Robots that mimic the movements, speech, appearance and behavior of humans were having their day even before the COVID-19 pandemic, but they’re now getting a significant boost because of it. We have been promised androids as helpers and antagonists in countless works of fiction in every medium for many decades.
Like science fiction’s promised ubiquitous flying cars, jetpacks and regular interplanetary travel—androids have been slower to appear in real life than the likes of Phillip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov had assured us. But they ARE here now, and more of them will follow. In robotics taxonomy, humanoid robots are a subset of a larger group of “service robots,” and overlap significantly with another larger subset: “social robots.”
BCC Research sat down with Agility Robotics Co-founder and CEO Jonathan Hurst, PhD, for a look at the current state of the art of legged, humanoid robots.
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