In 1986, Honda
built a pair of robotic legs that could walk in a line. A decade later,
it added an upper body. Yesterday in Tokyo, Honda’s latest robot,
Asimo, met its first world leader: It chatted in English with U.S.
President Barack Obama, then ran, jumped and kicked a soccer ball.
For its next trick, Honda believes, Asimo will give the automaker an edge in building the car of the future.
The kid-size robot, which can also
acknowledge a raised hand and track three conversations at once, is the
product of three decades of work in image processing, voice recognition
and artificial intelligence — essentially, the pursuit of judgment by a
machine. Honda says it can apply much of that knowledge to driverless
cars, which many automakers and industry analysts believe will be a
fixture of the next decade.
“Cars until now have had only rudimentary
recognition and judgment abilities. The strength of robots is they can
work out really sophisticated reactions,” said Hiroshi Kawagishi, 51, a
longtime Honda engineer. “If we can apply this kind of sophistication on
cars, we could come up with something completely different.”
Honda, Volvo Cars, Nissan Motor Co. and
others are jockeying against the likes of Google Inc. to roll out
driverless cars. Many are also working on technology that will let these
vehicles talk to, and avoid, each other. Honda’s driverless car push
expanded in 2011, when it paired auto engineers with Kawagishi and other
robotics researchers.
That team’s success will help determine if
Honda will see a return on three decades worth of work on robots that
has cost, by conservative estimate, hundreds of millions of dollars.
Robot benefits?
“What’s going to be the payback?” said Edwin
Merner, president of Atlantis Investment Research Corp., which manages
about $3 billion in assets and who doesn’t own Honda shares. “If you
can’t show me that’s going to help the company in the future, within a
few years, then you should stop.”
Honda, which hasn’t had an unprofitable year
in at least five decades, declined to break out the cost of its
robotics efforts. It is estimated to spend about 1 percent of its annual
research and development budget on robots, said Koji Endo, senior
analyst at Advanced Research Japan in Tokyo. That would come out to
about $50 million annually, based on the company’s 2012 R&D
spending.
Asimo is good for marketing and also
generates technologies that can be used in vehicles, Tetsuo Iwamura, the
Honda executive vice president, said in an interview. “Investors
understand that these two things are meaningful.”
Crowded field
While Honda is a prime mover in robotics and
autonomous driving, it will have to focus as others work on similar
technologies, said Sethu Vijayakumar, professor of robotics at the
University of Edinburgh. “They will have to start looking into where
they will take this technology,” he said.
As commuters across the world face concerns
as diverse as urban gridlock and highway safety, the driverless car
provides one possible answer. Such cars could shuttle themselves between
customers, reducing vehicle ownership and parking snarls. Cars
communicating in a common language would move more efficiently, reducing
gridlock.
Global sales of such cars are expected to
reach 11.8 million in 2035, said Egil Juliussen, an analyst at IHS
Automotive, who projects that by 2050 almost all cars will be
self-driving.
Slow steps
Honda’s robotics program is a fixture at a
company that has a tradition of keeping its engineers challenged by
giving them stints away from auto projects. The company also has teams
that design jet planes and racing cars.
The robotic legs that Honda engineers
designed in 1986 took five to 20 seconds to take each step. An early
humanoid version, P3, was an almost-adult-sized 63 inches.
“It looked a bit dictatorial,” said Satoshi
Shigemi, who leads the humanoid robot development team. Asimo a foot
shorter. “We wanted to make it look like a primary school kid helping
his father pick up a newspaper in the morning.”
Honda has said it envisions its robots performing dangerous tasks or assisting the elderly or bedridden.
“I keep training every day so that sometime
in the future I can help people in their homes,” an Asimo told the U.S.
president yesterday. Obama faced the robot and bowed slightly.
Early stumbles
There have been stumbles. A YouTube video of
an Asimo demonstration from the middle of the last decade shows the
robot climbing steps, then buckling and falling over. The latest Asimo
can run on uneven surfaces and avoid spills by kicking a leg to
counterbalance itself. Honda’s Iwamura said the company can apply that
stability technology to its cars and motorcycles.
Made of magnesium alloy covered with white
plastic resin, Asimo is fitted with eight microphones, 14 power sensors
that read the direction and amount of force, sonic-wave sensors that
detect obstacles as far as three meters (almost 10 feet) away, and two
stereo cameras that can sweep 120 degrees.
That information is processed by software
that lets the robot negotiate obstacles and interpret postures, gestures
and faces. Honda researchers are fine-tuning Asimo’s ability to
distinguish between a person walking past and one who wants to stop and
chat, said Kawagishi.
That’s the sort of judgment capability that
can be applied to cars: Asimo’s image-processing technology can
recognize whether a pedestrian is leaning forward to cross a street.
Artificial intelligence software can judge quickly enough to react, said
Yoshiharu Yamamoto, the president of Honda’s research and development.
Speed test
The challenge will be to adapt those
capabilities to cars’ faster speeds, said Takashi Morimoto, consultant
for Frost & Sullivan International, a consulting company.
“Yes, Honda’s Asimo technology is more
advanced than others, but the challenge is how fast and accurate it can
be,” said Morimoto. “It has to make judgment by processing five or six
different factors around the car.”
In October, Honda allowed reporters to ride
in the rear seat of an autonomous Accord fitted with a stereo camera,
two radars and other sensors. Driving in a demonstration area, the car
paused to let a pedestrian cross the road. It slowed so a motorcycle
could pass. It stopped to make way for an unseen vehicle — obscured by a
mockup building — as WiFi devices on both vehicles communicated with
each other.
Car talk
Honda is facing increasingly intense
competition from companies and academics. Google, the Mountain View,
California- based operator of the largest Web search engine, has bought
at least seven companies for a robotics project to expand beyond online
search, including Schaft Inc., a Tokyo-based maker of two-legged robots,
and Boston Dynamics Inc. Google has been testing driverless cars
mounted with cameras, radar sensors and lasers on U.S. roads.
An edge for its car over rivals can help
Honda move up the rankings among carmakers. In the year ended March
2013, Honda posted an operating profit margin of 5.52 per cent, behind
Toyota Motor Corp.’s 5.99 per cent over the same period, according to
data compiled by Bloomberg.
“I don’t think it will be profitable anytime
soon,” Mitsushige Akino, chief fund manager at Ichiyoshi Asset
Management Co. said, referring to the Asimo project. “But it is good for
companies to try and invest in new technologies as long as the company
itself is profitable.”
