Hiroshi Ishiguro is a busy man. Between his two jobs, countless
meetings and presentations, his demanding schedule was eating up
all his time. So he built an android version of himself to pick up
the slack. Ishiguro, a senior researcher at ATR Intelligent
Robotics and Communication Laboratories outside Kyoto, has created
a machine in his own image -- a robot that looks and moves exactly
like him. It sits on a chair and gazes around the room in a very
humanlike fashion, just like its creator. In fact, the robot is an
exact duplicate. Ishiguro's silicone-and-steel doppelg䮧er was made
from casts taken from his own body. Powered by pressurized air and
small actuators, it runs on semiautonomous motion programs.It
blinks and fidgets in its seat, moving its foot up and down
restlessly, its shoulders rising gently as though it were
breathing.
These micromovements are so convincing that it's hard to believe
this is a machine -- it seems more like a man wearing a rubber
mask. But a living, breathing man.But "Geminoid HI-1," as the robot
is called, has another trick up its sleeve."Everyone, thank you so
much for coming today," it says in polite but languid Japanese at
an ATR demo Thursday, its lips moving to the sound. The voice is
Ishiguro's, broadcast through a speaker inside his android
double.Geminoid can be operated remotely so the robot reproduces
the voice, posture and lip movements of Ishiguro, who wears a
motion-capture system. A mouseclick raises a hand or
finger.Ishiguro, whose job is teaching at Osaka University, an
hour's drive away, designed Geminoid so he could "robot in" to his
classes and skip the commute. As he steps out from behind a curtain
like the Wizard of Oz, standing beside his robot self, the shift is
disconcerting.