HUBO

There is a constant deliberation amidst the Robotics community: can humanoid bots be really developed? If they can be, would they be capable of emulating human behavior or even perhaps match the competencies displayed by the human brain to some extent?

The answer to these questions can be further explored through the development of the first Android based humanoid bot by Professor Oh Jun-Ho, on behalf of Korea Advanced institute of science and technology, with the lower body of a bipedal frame, that of a robot, while keeping the head of a human(Albert Einstein in this case). The capabilities of this humanoid bot, though limited, include features such as independent eye movements on both the eyes, facial gestures, voice recognition and synthesis apart from movement freedom on more than 3 independent axes. There has also been a development of the HUBO 2 by the same organisation on similar scales as the upgraded version to HUBO also known as Albert HUBO.

The robot is specially known for its facial gestures which are closely matched to the more than 1000 facial gestures that the human face is capable of. Also another remarkable feature of this bot is the capability to produce a synthesized voice on the patterns of the voice of the famous physicist Albert Einstein. The bi-pedal frame is capable also of matching the human type walking movement though  it is still at very slow speeds, which in turn are a remarkable feature for such a frame.

The technicalities of this bot are also a benchmark in this industry with various motors and special sensors put in place to monitor and to react to situations on real time basis. It uses two on-board PC104 processors and solid state drives for faster instruction processing power and retrieval. The left one can control the entire robot, taking care of functions such as walking and overall stabilization; the right one on the other hand is normally empty and one can load speech, vision, and navigation algorithms. 

Such humanoid bots are a great leap in terms of human based interactions because such bots can be very readily deployed in the future in places of public interest to interact with live humans and perhaps provide more options and benchmarks in terms of the human-bot interaction in a more informal manner.