Saber Marionette Japanese develop 'female' android

Well, there's an important movement to technology. That girl...erm...android, looks realy from my screen (5 year old....brightness wont go up, so i dont see the pic how it should exactly look like).
But all in all, thats amazing. Cant wait till we have androids walking around, because that would be the bomb....idk why, it just would.
Hopefully, if in the future they are so easly manufacturable, the public may be able to buy one of their own. (Sounds more like Chobits... since i doubt people would use them for other stuff than calculating and doing chores...at least as a household item...would they?! )
But using them as spies would be another good thing....but i rather the first thing.


- Kaiyon

 

The cat says it all.

 

However...

Actuators are a very primitive technology, for the "real thing" we'll have to wait until artificial muscles are developed. I bet it'll be around 20 years or something.

 

eesh i saw this on tv its even weirder to see it (...ummm her?) move *.* cool though

 

You need to watch SMJ. The fact is, with the exception of Lime, Cherry, and Bloodberry, that's exactly how marionettes are treated and are used. As household appliances. They DON'T do anything more than various chores for their master. The only thing that separates ordinary marionettes from the girls is the Maiden Circuit.

Which, by the way, is the next hot item I'll be looking forward to from Japan.

 

i want cherry

 

Actually, there is something very similar to artificial muscles.
Imagine a wire that contracts when you heat it enough (for example making an electric current run through it) and extends when it cools, and is hard enough to lift quite heavy things when it contracts.
This exists, and its commercial names are muscle wire, flexinol wire or nitinol wire. It's a "shape memory alloy" made of titanium and nickel.

I've used it myself a couple years ago in a high school project (a very simple hexapod bot). It consisted on a PVC slab with 6 legs joined in three groups of 2, and three tiny strings of muscle wire, each tied to a group of legs. It was powered by a 5V power supply. No motors, no complex mechanics either. Just some pieces of PVC glued together... and three strings. A PC through a printer cable controlled the order in which the legs had to move to make the thing walk, with a program written in C.

Believe me, it was uncanny to watch it move, because it made no noise and its movement was smooth and steady, very "organic", just like an animal; and the wires were almost unnoticeable so it seemed to be just plastic, crawling around.

The problem with muscle wire is that you can control how fast it contracts by heating it faster (i.e. more current), but for it to extend it has to cool and be pulled, and this takes longer...
Back then I thought, what if we packed together a bunch of wires and soldered or joined their ends somehow (to make tendoms), and then filled the space between the wires with a dielectric liquid coolant? We would have a muscle, very powerful because its strength is the sum of every single wire it contains, and the "slow extension" problem would be solved with the coolant.
What prevented me to actually try this was the price of the wires and I had no means to solder their ends together, so I left the project. But I still believe these might be the perfect actuators for androids, then cyborgs, and then why not? even marionettes

For more info, search in google for "muscle wire", "nanomuscle", "flexinol", "nitinol", "electric piston".

 

Meh, that marionette is a REAL marionette. What can it do by it's own? Nothing. The only difference with other androids is that it has a better skin.

About artificial muscles, there have been artificial muscles for so long. Some are powered by air.

 

It can do something on its own - interact with humans. It may be in a pre-programmed and limited way, but it's a start.

About air-powered muscles... they need an air compressor so big and noisy that they're even less practical than common servos.

 

Any simple robot does that