The robot waves at me. I tentatively wave back. I’m at Galaxy Robot Park in South Korea, experiencing the future — or, at least, a vision of one. By now, millions have seen viral videos of humanoid robots. At their best, they beat athletics world records. At their worst, they run headfirst into walls. The implicit promise of robots that look like us is that one day, they will be able to act like us too. But how close are we to that future?
This park in Seoul — opened by Galaxy Corporation, an entertainment and technology company — offers one version, in which robots entertain us and act as our companions. Central to this vision is Unitree Robotics, the Chinese company behind the humanoids in most viral robot videos. Unitree’s flagship G1 model is one of the most widely available humanoid robots in the world. At about $13,500, it is also one of the more affordable options.
Machines already assemble products in factories and vacuum our floors. But the next frontier is robots that can do whatever we want, autonomously. Many envision robots that look like us, with the assumption that they are best suited to navigate a world built for humans.
"There’s a weight of possibilities mapped onto these humanoid robots that a lot of us carry around," said John Mc Cormick, an artist and professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia who is programming his own Unitree robots. But such performances engender unrealistic expectations, he said, adding that their moves appear complex but they are still mostly following preprogrammed routines.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing