Robot Country Question?

[Humanoido]

Which countries should be honored for their contributions to robotics? I'm creating a robotics rendition and would like to pay respect to those nations. Opinions welcomed!

humanoido

[i-Bot]

In my opinion country is not a good parameter to determine contribution. While it is sometimes good to have the country team focus in competition, this does not really relate to contribution.

My first thoughts were to propose Japan, USA, Korea, but then I look at the next level and there are so many major personal contributions by so many people in other countries which exceed the govenment sponsored efforts in these countries.

I would rather see robotics being global and since it is such an opportunity and also such a risk, would rather avoid the past country competitive scenes we have had in nuclear and space technology.

I think honours go to the people and organisations who break the country barriers. This Robosavvy website is a good example of global co-operation. I don't even know where Robot-Dreams is based and I don't care, it seems to have no artificial barriers of country or state.

That honour and respect is due is without doubt. Maybe you should honour individuals as in the Nobel awards, with country as a secondary attribute.

[limor]

I often find amazing work done in complete (internet) silence especially where English is not the spoken language. I hope to start organizing these findings here on the site in the future.

If you are looking for correlation between robot research and countries, you will find that Japan and Korea have government sponsorship programs of hundreds of millions of $ for robot research and robotic startups. Also you will find that in Europe, Germany has several universities dedicating lots of people and efforts and great research results to participate in Robocup. This is also due to the fact that German students are allowed to study in university at the expense of the government for up to 5 years whereas this is not the case in Portugal for example where students have to pay their tuition and living. I've met German students participating at Robocup who have taken a "year off" to dedicate themselves to Robocup.

Maybe now that quality robot actuators are showing up at reasonable prices (Robotis, Robobuilder, Kondo..) and embedded computer boards provide plenty of computation power at low cost, maybe more robot research will develop in USA and Europe given that historically only very expensive industrial robots were used for such research and hence it was a very lucrative and expensive (and difficult) type of research to conduct.

[i-Bot]

Great idea Limor. Put this one on your list:

http://loslocosrh-ev.blogspot.com/

[srobot]

The USA has the most (known) robots for war.

Japan has more robots for friends.

I think there is more people in the UK who have bipeds over the USA, and the USA has more sumo robots over the UK, but I'm not quite sure...

Cheers,
--srobot

[limor]

Great idea Limor. Put this one on your list:
http://loslocosrh-ev.blogspot.com/

great stuff. Someone mentioned this link on the forum recently.

[tempusmaster]

Just my opinion, but the country distinction has become pretty meaningless.

When I visit the research labs at Tsukuba or Waseda the researchers, while primarily Japanese, include French, German, Italian, Indian, Singaporean, Chinese, Korean, Mexican, and sometimes even an American or two. I've often had the same experience visiting companies and universities in the US and the UK.

The same is often true of commercial products. For a long time some of the core design work at Sony was lead by an Italian guru, while one of the most popular humanoid robots was actually designed in a totally different country than most people believe.

[limor]

one of the most popular humanoid robots was actually designed in a totally different country than most people believe..

hm... hint ?

[tempusmaster]

one of the most popular humanoid robots was actually designed in a totally different country than most people believe..

hm... hint ?

No way I'm going to go on the record on that one... But it should be fairly easy for someone with experience to figure out.

[Humanoido]

tempusmaster wrote:
one of the most popular humanoid robots was actually designed in a totally different country than most people believe..

Why is it a secret?

[tempusmaster]

tempusmaster wrote:
one of the most popular humanoid robots was actually designed in a totally different country than most people believe..

Why is it a secret?

You would have to ask the company. I assume that if they wanted the world to know, they would have said something themselves.

Companies have product design contracted out all the time, just like famous people hire ghost writers to pen their books.

[limor]

Here's one conspiracy theory i'm happy to instigate !

Can it be that the KHR2HV.. Japanese pride and joy was designed by Taiwanese company??

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AVING Special Report on 'TAITRONICS Autumn 2006') -- Taiwan robot servo 'Shayang Ye Industrial' introduced its digital servo motor 'SYS-2140' which demonstrates kung fu actions run by built-in software.

I saw them advertising on the latest Robot Magazine with a picture of an unidentified humanoid (or is it a purpusefully obfuscated KHR2HV of the "no copyright infringement here" type.. hmm...). A bit of googling and i found the above article dated just around the notoriously delayed launch of KHR2HV in Autumn 2006.

[tempusmaster]

Here's one conspiracy theory i'm happy to instigate !

Can it be that the KHR2HV.. Japanese pride and joy was designed by Taiwanese company??

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AVING Special Report on 'TAITRONICS Autumn 2006') -- Taiwan robot servo 'Shayang Ye Industrial' introduced its digital servo motor 'SYS-2140' which demonstrates kung fu actions run by built-in software.

I saw them advertising on the latest Robot Magazine with a picture of an unidentified humanoid (or is it a purpusefully obfuscated KHR2HV of the "no copyright infringement here" type.. hmm...). A bit of googling and i found the above article dated just around the notoriously delayed launch of KHR2HV in Autumn 2006.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I beleive the KHR-2HV started shipping in Japan on June 2nd, 2006 and evaluation units were floating around before that. I attended some of the briefings and demos here as early as March. The overseas shipments may have been delayed by the 'I' company trying to get its act together....

And, I can confirm that the KHR-2HV was designed by Yoshimura-san, just like the original KHR-1.