Toy Robots: Fun and More
Michel Marriott New York Times Service
Monday, March 26, 2001
Utilitarian Machines Profit From Advances for Kids
NEW YORK At the annual Toy Fair here, the huge show where the toy industry promotes its newest creations, robots were everywhere.
Tiger Electronics, a division of Hasbro Inc., showed off no fewer than two dozen interactive robotic toys that it plans to unleash for the holiday season. They include a free-ranging turtle and other automatons for the fish bowl, as well as a gleaming, robotic baby that coos while responding to touch, sight and sound.
There were plenty of robotic toys from other makers, too: more dogs than you can throw a stick at, joined by cats, birds, mice, bugs, dinosaurs and even potted plants.
Many are crammed with sophisticated electronics and software so that they can sense walls or other obstacles. Many can hear and recognize simple speech and respond to commands; some can see, detecting light and even colors. And all are capable of movement.
These toys might represent the best of their breed, but they are still only toys. None of them measures up to the vision of robots as powerful, helpful servants made popular decades ago in science fiction like Isaac Asimov's stories and the "Jetsons" cartoon series.
While the fair last month was overrun by toy robots, the relatively modest number of useful robots are mostly tucked away in research laboratories or at work on factory floors.
But robotic toys, experts say, may help usher in the day, in the not too distant future, when more practical, utilitarian robots are common around the house.
The clever use in toys of microprocessors, memory chips, sensors, servomotors and advanced software, like the sort that makes voice recognition possible, is pointing the way to vastly more advanced robots that can work with humans without intimidating them.
"Toys are just the tip of the iceberg in what is coming," said Wayne Walter, a founder of the Laboratory for Cooperative, Autonomous Microsystems at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Moreover, some analysts say, by growing up with robots as favorite toys, a generation of children may more readily accept robotic assistants working among them in the home or office when they are adults.
"These toys are opening the door for broad acceptance of robotics in the same way that Pong and other home computer toys opened the way for computers to be used on a daily basis," said Brian Friedman, managing director of Robotic Ventures, a Chicago venture capital company that invests in robotics and artificial-intelligence companies.
Nowhere is the influence of robotic toys more pervasive than in the area of robot-human interaction. Here, some robotics specialists say, toys might have a few tricks to teach more utilitarian robots of the future about how humanlike they have to act and look.
Like early 20th-century forecasts of flying family automobiles by the 21st century, the walking, talking, mostly anthropomorphic robots in the home, office and factory never materialized. By the mid-1980s, serious talk about a personal robot - a tireless, intelligent, forever helpful mechanical servant, something to wash the dishes, clean the house, cook the meals, water the plants and watch the children - had all but vanished.
Instead, Mr. Friedman said, highly specialized robots emerged, often designed to take over repetitive or dangerous tasks. Robots also became popular research projects at universities around the world. Nevertheless, Jeff Burnstein, vice president for marketing and public relations at the Robotic Industries Association, said useful interactive home robots were becoming more likely by the day.
"If you get more sophisticated in voice recognition and sensor technology and vision," Mr. Burnstein said, "you are getting to a point where it becomes more likely that you are going to have useful home robots. But there are still a lot of hurdles."
Pradeep Khosla, a professor of engineering and robotics at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, said the designers of advanced robotics could learn a key lesson from the popularity of electronic toy robots.
"They make these machines human-friendly and take away the intimidation factor," Mr. Khosla said.
Many of the robotic toys bubble over with virtual personalities - cute, microchip-based quirks that Andrew Filo, an inventor who has worked with Tiger Electronics, calls a "variation in their emotional states." Some speak or light up in response to certain stimuli; others respond to voice commands.
Such capabilities are crucial to much more sophisticated robots designed to perform in the home, Mr. Khosla said. It would be difficult for humans to interact with robots on the machines' terms. Instead, he said, a robot must be able to understand humans on their terms. That means understanding spoken human language, gestures and body language.
"We must build robots to reach the level of human interaction," Mr. Khosla said, "instead of making human beings stoop to the level of the robot."
But not everyone is convinced of the value of toys in the evolution of robots. The playful nature of toys is not really adaptable to more serious robots, said Joseph Engelberger, who in the 1950s invented the first industrial robot.
"When I tell a robot to get me a beer," he said, "I don't want it horsing around. I want it to get a beer
AI
