Meet SDR-4X

[Guest Decatur]

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

This is SDR-4X, the newest robot from Sony. Sony's last robot was Aibo, the robotic pet-dog. What this little thing can do is pretty amazing, I want one. Too bad it costs as much as a luxury car...

TOKYO (Reuters) - Judging from the cooing at a demonstration of Sony's diminutive SDR robot, few would dispute just how cute the humanoid machine is.

Its creator Masahiro Fujita, who called it "him" instead of "it", seemed to feel genuinely guilty as he pushed it over to show how easily it gets back up.

"I don't like this," he said.

But while Sony, the world's largest consumer electronics maker, may have succeeded in creating a cuddly humanoid robot, it still faces a daunting question.

Who would buy it?

When Sony showed off the last version of SDR a year ago, with a song-and-dance routine and simple conversations with humans, executives hoped to have a model on the market by the end of the year at roughly the price of a luxury car.

That proved too ambitious, however, and the company is still struggling to gauge what consumers would want from a humanoid robot and how much they'd be willing to pay for it.

"We'll never give up commercialising this humanoid robot," Fujita, principal scientist in Sony's Intelligent Dynamics Laboratory, told a demonstration for foreign reporters on Thursday.

While reluctant to provide a target date, he said -- when pressed -- that he hoped SDR would hit the market within a few years.

The updated SDR boasts a handful of improvements over its predecessor, including an extra microprocessor to help it make small talk and special sensors to keep it from pinching a human as it moves its arms or legs.

At fewer than 60 cm (24 inches) tall and a slight seven kilograms (15 lbs), the robot is too small to pose much of a threat to furniture or other household objects.

And it has new mapping and motion control capabilities to help it avoid tripping over obstacles and to protect itself by putting out its arms when it does fall.

The approach at Sony, which wants to make home robots that entertain their owners, contrasts sharply with companies like Honda, whose Asimo robot aims to become a human helper.

Sony also makes the Aibo (news - web sites) robotic pet, which was a sell-out success when it debuted in 1999.

SDR can only converse in Japanese so far, but Fujita said Sony engineers were working on speech synthesis and recognition technology for English and other foreign languages, as well.

He cited the 1960s Japanese TV series "Astro Boy", an animated feature about a boy-robot superhero, and Japan's animistic Shinto tradition, which holds that spirits reside even in mountains and other inanimate objects, among reasons why Japanese seem to harbour a special affinity towards robots.

But he also warned of potential dangers from the technology.

Without strict network security, for example, he noted that robots connected to the Internet could be taken over by hackers and used to spy on or wreak havoc in a home.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Watch Him do some Tai Chi! (requires quicktime)

[PogoC7]

Those Japanese love robots. Robotic fish, birds, dogs, cats, pigs, and now human robots. It's ALL GOOD.