Honda's robot, Asimo, looks like a 4-foot-tall astronaut and can help the disabled at home.
"With running - we are trying to get Asimo to stay upright, to react quickly, " says Mr Keeney.
Honda's robot, ASIMO, is humanoid and can walk, talk and respond to commands.
In the last year Asimo has mastered running and more importantly, the ability to react to a changing environment.
The self-taught roboticist has drawn inspiration from Honda's ASIMO robot and Drexel University's HUBO as well as sounding out opinion at his local hackerspace.
Asimo, by contrast, is an ornate, expensive and complicated piece of machinery that really only seems useful if you need a machine that can climb a stair for you.
Resembling a small child wearing an astronaut outfit with a backpack (for the battery power source), the ASIMO could walk on two feet at speeds at over three miles per hour.
FORBES: Reflections on Personal Robots, Backwards and Forwards
Early last year Honda demonstrated how their robot Asimo could lift an arm or a leg through signals sent wirelessly from a system operated by a user with an EEG cap.
From the Japanese automobile maker Honda, the ASIMO robot was an in-house project throughout the 2000s, and was taller than the QRIO by two feet and weighed more than three times more.
FORBES: Reflections on Personal Robots, Backwards and Forwards
It doesn't walk on two legs, like Honda 's (nyse: HMC - news - people ) 4-foot-tall Asimo, which the company hopes will someday help disabled people around the house.
And while Asimo is just the latest in a long line of showy prototypes, Honda appears to be looking further down the road to the day when robots will helps us out around the house.
But reality fell short of our plans: Honda Motor trotted out its Asimo in 2000, but for now it's been relegated to temping as a receptionist at Honda and doing eight shows a week at Disneyland.
And unless you're physically unable to do things like turn off lights or answer the door, would you pay a few thousand dollars (Honda's press release says nothing about what Asimo might cost) for that kind of help?
Asimo (the name stands for "Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility") is a descendent of two previous robots: the P2, a prototype that first debuted in 1996, and the P3, which began to walk around Honda labs in 1997.
But reality fell short of our plans: Honda Motor (nyse: HMC - news - people ) trotted out its Asimo in 2000, but for now it's been relegated to temping as a receptionist at Honda and doing eight shows a week at Disneyland.
应用推荐