February 18, 2009

The Future, Now


Honda's ASIMO ready to put on a show.


Hey everyone! Been a while. I`m going to be talking a bit about Japanese technology.
A lot of people seem to hold the stereotype that the Japanese have a lot of advanced technology and the truth is, they do.


In the labs of researchers all of Japan, they're making robots that not only clean your house but serve you food and do the dishes afterward. They're also putting these robots in super-sleek and neat looking cars to calm you down while you drive if you become tense and angry.


Of course, some movies bring up the idea of pool-cleaning robots that might try to take over the world, but thankfully these products aren't being produced for the market. You could imagine I`d want to be bringing back a lot of awesome high-tech toys back home although I'm not sure how my parents would feel about that...


One of the most well-known robots ever to come out of Japan is Honda's ASIMO. With prototypes dating back to 1986, ASIMO debuted in 2000 with the most recent version unveiled in 2005. This amazing robot is now capable of social and physical interaction, greeting and following people, sensing movement, be directed by voice commands or the natural movements of human beings, and even recognizing faces! It is basically making the first real steps towards an anthropomorphic robot!


Unfortunately, the technology seen in everyday life is not the same as that in the high-tech research world, other than a few gadgets here and there (including the Japanese toilets). As I see it, the professional world of technology is the one that is more advanced and should be the one associated with the 'Advanced technology' stereotype people have of Japan.


Anyway, I think robotics are possibly the coolest thing to go into as far as science goes. Imagine meeting someone and telling them that, `Yes, I am the key to showing the world what we once thought was science fiction.`. In Japan, they do a whole lot of advances in robotics that seem to stump the imagination of even Leonardo da Vinci's Mechanical Knight.


That`s it for now.


And remember:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
(ed- That is the first of three robot rules applied to any robotic creature in writer and inventor Isaac Asimov's stories. It is perhaps most well known as one of the rules governing the robots in the movie "I, Robot", a 2004 film based off a collection of short stories of the same name written by Asimov in the 1940s.)


-David

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about Seiritsu

Seiritsu Gakuen is a private co-educational high school created in 1925 and it is located in Tokyo, Japan.

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