It's Time to Take Your Medicine.... (Robots part 2)

I saw Honda's ASIMO robot today at the Robotopia Rising exhibit at the Kennedy Center, and I have to say that the presentation was not really all it could have been. ASIMO has a handful of showcase-abilities, all of them made most significant by the fact that ASIMO is life-sized, about as big as a twelve year old human.

So keeping that in mind, the biggest challenge in ASIMO's design has obviously been balance. ASIMO can't just casually throw its weight around. Walking, running, climbing stairs, kicking a ball, and "dancing..." these are all things ASIMO can do... but slowly. And carefully.

So, ASIMO was presented in a 15 minute show that was clearly aimed at kids. Which means they had a lady using her best kindergarten teacher voice to try to get everybody really, really excited about whatever ASIMO was about to do. This is kind of a subtle robot, though. For example, when it runs, it doesn't really look like it's running. It's more of a half-comical sneaking motion.

When you build something up like it's going to be awesome, knowing full well that it isn't all that visually impressive, that makes the event itself kind of a disappointment. It was like that all throughout the show, especially when it came time for ASIMO to dance.

Now, ASIMO can't actually move its lower body very well, so what it did was slowly and randomly move its arms around until the music stopped. It was really kind of sad. And then, as the show moved into the possible practical applications of ASIMO as an aide to the elderly, the show took on the "forced" and "creepy" aspects that are almost inevitable to any discussion of using the clumsy, slow, and awkward robots we have right now with vulnerable people in need of reliable help.

What would have made the ASIMO presentation really engaging, in my opinion, was more talk about the challenges of getting it to do the things it can do, and the ways its developers failed along the way, as a means of explaining how they learned from their failures to make it work. That way, the audience would better appreciate why ASIMO isn't quite ready to shake its booty yet.

So, discussion question. Is there a difference between making a science exhibit accessible and inviting to kids, and targeting it at them? Grownups made ASIMO, shouldn't there be a layer to its presentation intended for them as well? Or is the only purpose of an exhibit like this one to get the young ones excited about technology and learning?

Lucky for me, inventor/artist-troupe Maywa Denki were also performing at the Kennedy Center, providing fun and song with their "Original Instruments" consisting of guitars that play themselves, singing "robots" powered by bellows, a kind of electric castanet-set mounted on a pair of wings, and a number of other percussion instruments based off of a basic "knocker" device that goes "bonk" and "clunk" at different pitches. The group invents and creates their own instruments (among other things), then presents them as "products" as part of their performance art motif, which hearkens back to the small electric stores of a bygone era.

Not only are the instruments innovative and funny, but some of their songs were pretty catchy, too.

Others, just weird. But even still, somehow wonderful.