Wednesday, October 22, 2008
The Real Wall-E
Will robots of the future serve as means of actively helping humans? This ScienCentral News video reports on a real robot that could help us take care of elderly relatives, for example, from miles away. The uBot-5 is a small and lightweight research platform for mobile manipulation. It was designed to be an economical robot that is highly capable, durable, and safe to operate. When equipped with a LCD touchscreen monitor and a webcam, the uBot-5 can be used for social telepresence applications. Additionally the teleoperator can use the uBot-5's manipulation capabilities to perform useful work.
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2 comments:
That's cool! I think robots would really help us in the future for bettering our environment. I really enjoyed the Wall-e images. Good job on find the clip!
Rosie
But could the transition to use of non-human individuals be a mistake? Robots lack feeling and originality, two key human characteristics. Thus, extensive presence of robots could diminish society's creativity and would, more importantly, diminish human interaction. As Bill McKibben argued in his lecture, humans as a whole have been distancing themselves from one another. So wouldn't the use of robots diminish human connections to an even greater extent and incease this distance?
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