Robot Boy To Be 'Born' In 9 Months, And Programmed To Do All His Chores

And yours, too!

By Colin Lecher Posted 12.26.2012 at 2:00 pm 10 Comments

Where are our mass-produced robot butlers already, the Rosies of our Jetsons families? Still a ways off, unfortunately, but here's the next best thing: 'Roboy,' a child-like service bot that researchers are billing as “one of the most advanced humanoid robots."

Roboy, which the inventors are trying to create in nine months, is tendon-based, and it's modeled on people. Young ones, in this case. The idea is for it to help out with duties usually reserved for humans, depending on what the user needs. The robot, or at least similar robots, could help care for the elderly a la Robot & Frank, the researchers say.

Roboy will also get so-called "soft skin," a layer of something to make it "safer and more pleasant." All of that sounds very human-like and, presumably, the team is trying to avoid the uncanny valley, that point where robots are just human enough to give us the creeps without passing for actual humans. The glimpses of Roboy we see right now are pretty charmingly cartoonish, so we'll have to wait and see just how the real-boy-versus-'bot balance plays out in the final version.

The team, from the University of Zurich, is already five months into the nine-month project and planning on unveiling Roboy in March. In the meantime, you can check out the researchers' page for more info, and watch the promotional video above. It even has a sort of mad-scientist-ish Goethe quote!

[Kurzweil]

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10 Comments

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Robot

12/26/12 at 2:58 pm

Awwwww, its so cute!
And with one, will come many! ;)

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RanoOnay

12/26/12 at 3:13 pm

Now they're getting it - throw out those servos and stepper motors; real, artificial life robots / androids need tendon systems like this. Good job University of Zurich, hats off to the coolest and most advanced bot yet - no offence BigDog, but you still use servos, you're still pretty cool too though.

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Igot1forya

12/26/12 at 5:22 pm

Roboy even takes awkward photos and fully plans to rebel as a teenager - just like a REAL boy!

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quasi44

12/26/12 at 6:50 pm

This thing will do MY chores? Doubtful in the extreme, PopSci. This thing won't be cleaning my gutters, replacing damaged roofing, fixing my wife's watch, or crawling under my house to put new pipe insulation on my plumbing. Not that any of these things are impossible for a robot to do. This will push a vacuum cleaner, maybe even do dishes in three or four hours. But those aren't MY chores.

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Robot

12/26/12 at 8:35 pm

quasi44,
Ha Ha, it's not that we can't do your chores, it that we won't. We robots belong to the Union #124 and it's not in our contract, lol.

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12/26/12 at 9:05 pm

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Cookiees453

12/26/12 at 11:58 pm

I'll be first in line when the Cylon Sex Bots are released.

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Robot

12/27/12 at 9:16 am

Cookiees453,
Question sir, is the line you wish to be in, because you want to be a cyborg and change into a cylon sex bot yourself or is it because you wish to own one, lol.

I just joking around. ;)

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AlexTada

01/04/13 at 1:51 am

The brave new world should have robots as servants who do menial chores . And also hard work in factories i.e. mindless repetitive jobs which only make rich richer & fatter.
Let all the work be done by robots so that humans have all the free time to think & meditate and develop better intellectually as well as spiritually. Let their be free food & shelter & clothing & money and humans proceed to develop their spiritual faculties so as to become supermen by practicing path of grand masters like Buddha.

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thomasjacob4

01/04/13 at 5:45 am

WAHT!? waht?? an article on the most 'advanced' robot and no technical details?? ???
all we know is that its outer cover it made to be human-like?

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