Japan’s robots stride into future

Western doubts over robots is absent in a land where machines can have a soul

By Mark Jacob, Tribune staff reporter

FROM CHICAGO TRIBUNE

TOKYO -- The Japanese are expecting house guests.

These visitors will stay for a long time, serving tea, cleaning house, making conversation and taking care of their hosts in old age.

They won't dominate the television or raid the refrigerator. But they may need a good vacuuming or reprogramming now and then, because they're robots.

"The machine is a friend of humans in Japan," said Shuji Hashimoto, a robotics professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. "A robot is a friend, basically. So it is easy to use machines in this country. But other countries, maybe, are quite different."

Indeed, they are. In the United States and the rest of the Western world, enthusiasm for robots is tempered by skepticism. In the next few weeks, an international group led by Italian roboticist Gianmarco Veruggio will unveil the first draft of its "code of ethics" for robots.

The Japanese aren't waiting for any rulebook. Embracing robots for deeply cultural reasons, they are in a headlong rush to welcome them into their lives as friends and personal assistants.

Japan's birthrate is declining, and more than a fifth of its population is over age 65--the largest percentage in the world. With an aversion to large-scale immigration, the Japanese see robots as a way to handle a number of tasks, especially care and companionship for the disabled and elderly.

Costly R&D

Creating a household robot is a daunting challenge. For financial reasons, Sony pulled the plug on its robo-dog Aibo and humanoid Qrio this year. Mitsubishi and Honda are pushing forward with humanoid robots that represent a vision of the future, even if their cost is too high and usefulness too low to reach a mass market right now.

Mitsubishi's Wakamaru robot is a house-sitter. The 3-foot-tall yellow wonder on wheels, named after an ancient samurai, can wake people up, warn them about the weather and patrol their house when they leave. It also recognizes faces and can talk.

"Wakamaru can make eye contact and then start the conversation," said Ryota Hiura, senior engineer on the company's robotics team.

Mitsubishi's machine has begun establishing the kind of robot-human relationships that Japanese scientists expect to become commonplace. Hiura told the story of an elderly woman who was dying of heart disease and wanted her Wakamaru to attend her funeral. Her wish was granted.

More than 100 copies of Wakamaru have been manufactured, and it is being sold for about $14,000.

Honda's ASIMO, an acronym for Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility, is a 4-foot-tall, white, two-legged humanoid robot with impressively fluid motion. Its latest version can run at 3.7 m.p.h. and can carry objects using a cart. Honda aims to find a useful role for the robot in offices before moving into the home market. Forty copies of ASIMO have been produced, and it can be rented for about $175,000 a year.

While these companion robots are in development, devices that merge man and machine--that create cyborgs--are moving toward market.

At Tsukuba University outside Tokyo, Yoshiyuki Sankai and his colleagues have developed a robot suit designed to help the weak to walk. The suit, sometimes described as "bionic trousers," senses motor nerve signals and moves in concert with people's bodies, increasing their strength. Stroke victims and spinal cord patients are beginning to use the suit. It may also be applied to the construction industry to boost workers' lifting power.

Sankai's project, called Hybrid Assistive Limb, will begin building a factory this year to produce the suit. There are plans to expand the project to Europe this year and Canada in 2007.

Atsuo Takanishi's lab at Waseda University is working on a "walking wheelchair" called the Multipurpose Biped Locomotor. A person who has trouble walking can sit atop the robot and use controls to move forward. The device--which still needs years of work, according to Takanishi--manages a feat that has been a challenge for robots: walking up stairs.

Issues over androids

Perhaps the most controversial type of robot is the android. At an expo in Japan last year, Osaka University's Hiroshi Ishiguro unveiled Repliee Q1expo, which he designed to look like Japanese newscaster Ayako Fujii.

Some roboticists believe it's a bad idea to make robots look like people.

Masahiro Mori, an emeritus professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, is famous for a theory called the "Uncanny Valley," which holds that as robots become more humanlike, people's empathy increases until a sudden point at which the machine seems like the living dead, like a frightening impostor. This period of alarm and revulsion is the Uncanny Valley, and it ends only when the robot reaches such a level of similarity to human beings that it is virtually indistinguishable from them.

Mori offered his theory in 1970, but it has become more popular and controversial in recent years. Some roboticists question whether the Valley even exists. But the concept has bled into a variety of other disciplines. Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert cited the Valley last spring when analyzing the effectiveness of computer-generated images on film.

To Mori, the emphasis on humanoid robots is overblown. He envisions a future in which robots of all shapes and sizes fit into the landscape. As an example, he cites a snakelike rescue robot that can dig into debris after an earthquake.

Whatever they look like, robots are being welcomed in Japan, for reasons that are both ancient and contemporary. The nation's chief religions--Shintoism and Buddhism--are extraordinarily open to robots in people's lives.

Shintoism holds that rocks, trees and indeed robots are imbued with a spirit or soul, just as people are. In the new book "Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots," Canadian journalist Timothy N. Hornyak notes that when industrial robots were introduced into Japanese factories, they were welcomed with Shinto rites and were considered a part of the staff.

`A robot is your child'

Mori, author of the book "The Buddha in the Robot," believes that robots can have Buddha-nature. Human beings, said Mori, should have an intimate relationship with the things they create.

"If you make something, your heart will go into the thing you are making," Mori said. "So a robot is an external self. If a robot is an external self, a robot is your child."

Japan's manga (comic books) and anime (animation) contribute to the country's welcoming nature toward robots. Many Japanese scientists grew up as admirers of the cartoon characters such as Mighty Atom (also known as Astro Boy), a robot that keeps the peace among human beings.

Western robo-phobia

Such robot heroes are more rare in the West. For every friendly machine such as Rosie the maid in "The Jetsons," there are hundreds of tin cans of terror in films such as "Terminator" and "I, Robot." In the West, said Hornyak, "there seems to be a strong tendency over decades to view robots as something evil, like technology run amok."

Paranoia over robots is lampooned in the 2005 book "How to Survive a Robot Uprising" by Daniel H. Wilson, who recently earned his doctorate in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The book has been optioned by Paramount Pictures, with actor Mike Myers signing on.

Wilson believes Americans eventually will accept robots in their daily lives, but they are likely to be single-function devices that cook or clean or organize, not friendly-faced humanoids that serve as all-purpose valets.

"In America, if a robot does its job, we're in favor of it," Wilson said. "But we're not willing to keep them around just because they're really cute."

SOURCE: CHICAGO TRIBUNE