Technology is a blessing. But its also bizarre, at least, at times. Imagine being able to strap on your VR headset and haptic feedback gloves and control a robot that’s somewhere else. And be…somewhere else.
This bizarre reality has arrived.
Its being called a humanoid robot. The iCub 3 robot can relay video and haptic feedback to a person who has the devices strapped on. And this can happen many miles away from the robot’s location.
This would invariably allow people to attend events remotely.
Imagine sending your iCub 3 robot to the next SuperBowl party, or Christmas. You’d be all the talk, but maybe not in the best of light.
Jokes aside, its difficult to ignore the deep innovation at play here.
The iCub 3 robot’s head offers two cameras that align with human eyes. Its brain, well that’s everything the Internet has to offer. And of course, its loaded from android head to android toes with sensors to pass on all the feels.
Us humans would sport a suit that absorbs these transmissions.
This doesn’t exactly look comfortable, but we’d imagine this suit technology gets better and better.
The Italian Institute of Technology came up with this super robot. They claim the delay in transmissions is a mere 100 milliseconds, if that. The human can move and react slower to compensate.
It was used to roam the halls of an exhibition center while its human guid remained many miles away.
The group hopes this leads to people being able to attend events in complete remote fashion. The main issue now is that the robot could topple over and apparently, damage floors.
“iCub 3 is an interesting robot and offers clear advantages from the previous iteration,” says Jonathan Aitken at the University of Sheffield, UK.
This is, of course, odd. But there are clear advantages in being able to attend events remote, particularly when we fall ill. But the obvious reservation here is that there’s a lot of people who seem to not prefer human contact. And that’s not a healthy way to live. Right now, this sort of technology is in its infancy and even when the robotic kinks work out, it will likely be unimaginably unaffordable. So we’ve got a long ways to go until Uncle Bob’s robotic self crashes Thanksgiving.