KAIST’s HUBO shows off some newfound dexterity, hides emotions behind ill-fitting motorcycle helmet

November 15th, 2009

Sometimes when we see the seemingly slow advance of Honda’s ASIMO, the inherent limitations of WowWee toys, or the purposefully limited one-off research projects of universities, we start to give up hope of being super best pals with a humanoid robot this century; hope of partaking in whimsical 80s movie hijinks, hand-in-metal-hand. This little video of the Korean Institute of Advanced Science and Technology’s recent advances on its HUBO project therefore serves as a bit of a “hope refresher,” allowing us to once again re-imagine those aforementioned scenes of whimsy with a metallic bot that can handle a sword and walk at an almost-useful pace, while inexplicably wearing a smallish, visored helmet. Sure, there’s a long way to go, but we’d just like to say that when the robot apocalypse doesn’t happen and we realize how much we really have in common with these machines we’ve built to look like us, that somewhere in late 2009 this video helped us keep on believing.

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Filed under: Robots