Robots have definately come a long way since Automaton, which could draw 4 pictures and write 3 poems (One in English and two in French), was built around the 1800's by Henri Maillardet.
I wanted to see if I could find the latest robot to be created, to compare it with Automaton, so I wrote in google "the newest robot" and got 40,300,000 results!
There seems to be a wide variety of robots being created from robotic birds, snakes and fish to the AIBO robot which plays with cats and Aldebaran Robotics' Nao which uses senses and picks objects up off floors.
There are robots which look like robots but there are also robots, being made, which are very human like.
I came across a website Robots.net which has an article about researchers at Osaka University who are making a life like robot of a 1-2 year old child, which will be used to study of human social development that can't otherwise be documented from the perspective of the child by eliciting natural responses from human caregivers.
Robots are being used and designed for many different purposes from being made for pure entertainment to be being made to be useful. For example, to study human behaviour like the robot I mentioned above and the ones being created to help armies carry weapons.
With looking at and reading about, all the things robots are capable of doing, are we really that far away from creating the likes of Bicentennial Man?
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