SOUTH KOREA VIES TO BE WORLD LEADER IN ROBOTS - June 19, 2009 Friday 11:48 AM EST - Control Engineering

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Control Engineering

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SOUTH KOREA VIES TO BE WORLD LEADER IN ROBOTS

Asia Pulse , June 19, 2009 Friday 11:48 AM EST

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Four-year old Hubo can jog at clip of about 3.6 km per hour, compared to an average adult who manages somewhere between 7 to 10 km per hour. He returns handshakes with a firm grip and, unlike others of his kind, can keep up with the best at rock-paper-scissors, his fingers fully mobile.

South Korea's first two-legged walking robot, Hubo is one of many achievements that have distinguished the country's robotics industry.

His name a condensed form of the term "humanoid robot," Hubo was recently adopted by the U.S. National Science Foundation as a "textbook" model of such technology.

Prof. Oh Jun-ho at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in the central city of Daejeon predicts that Hubo will eventually serve as an "Adam," or prototype for other humanoid robots whose overall appearance is based on that of the human body.

The creator of Hubo notes that a U.S. research team, joined by five universities including the University of Pennsylvania, is currently studying Hubo's interactions with made-for-human tools or environments.

"There was uneasiness among some of the U.S. scientists that the U.S. might fall behind South Korea and Japan in the field of humanoid robotics," he said.

"The United States has been concentrating mainly on artificial intelligence, while South Korea and Japan have made outstanding progresses in developing robots that move like humans."

There is a niche in the global robotics market for South Korea, as U.S. manufacturers have been relatively slow in developing non-industrial and non-surveillance robots, according to Prof. Oh, who adds that concerns over cost-effectiveness prevented his American counterparts from pursuing the technology more aggressively.

Scientists in the U.S. ...

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