Avatar-style South Korean manned robot takes first steps
Frozen for the love of life
A GIANT South Koreanbuilt manned robot that walks like a human but makes the ground shake under its weight has taken its first baby steps.
Designed by a veteran of science fiction blockbusters, the 4m high, 1.5ton Method-2 towers over a room on the outskirts of Seoul.
The hulking humanlike creation bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie Avatar .
It is claimed as a world first by its creators at Hankook Mirae Technology, a South Korean robotics company, where about 30 engineers were hard at work conducting initial tests last week.
“Our robot is the world’s first manned bipedal robot and is built to work in extreme hazardous areas where humans cannot go (unprotected),” company chairman Yang Jin-Ho said.
A pilot sitting inside the robot’s torso makes limb movements which are mimicked by Method-2, whose metal arms each weigh 130kg.
The robot, more than twice the size of a tall man, is so heavy that it shakes the ground when it takes a step with a loud whirring of motors.
Yang, who dreamed as a child of building his own robot, said he has invested 242-billion won (R2.7billion) in the project since 2014 to “bring to life what only seemed possible in movies and cartoons”.
Building the giant robot was a challenge for the engineers – most of them in their mid and late 30s – as its unprecedented scale meant they had nothing to refer to, said one who declined to be named.
So far, it remains unclear how the robot will be used. Method-2 is seen more as a test-bed for various technologies that will allow the creators to build any type and size of robot in future.
While its enormous size has grabbed media attention, the creators of Method-2 say the project’s core achievement is the technology they developed and enhanced along the way.
“Everything we have been learning so far on this robot can be applied to solve real-world problems,” designer Vitaly Bulgarov said on his Facebook page. He has previously worked on film series such as Transformers, Robocop and Terminator .
Yang said they had already received inquiries from industries ranging from manufacturing and construction to entertainment. There have even been questions about its possible deployment along the heavily fortified Demilitarised Zone with North Korea.
But the robot, tethered by a power cable and still a bit wobbly on its feet, is far from finished. More work is needed on its balance and power systems, according to its creators.
“The robot is one year old so it is taking baby steps,” Yang said. “Just like humans, it will be able to move more freely in the next couple of years.”
He said the robot would be ready for sale by the end of 2017 at a price of around 10-billion won (R114-million). — AFP THE British “futurist” in charge of one of the world’s largest cryonics firms has compared himself to Leonardo da Vinci, saying it is just a matter of time before science advances to the point where preserved bodies can be revived after death.
Dr Max More also disclosed he had plans to preserve just his head in the future, saying “the rest of my body is replaceable”.
More is the president and chief executive of Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, which began storing bodies in 1982.
Last year, a 14-year-old girl who died of cancer became the youngest Briton to be cryogenically frozen in the hope she can be “woken up” and cured in the future. She had won a landmark court case to win the right to do so.
The body of the girl arrived at the only other crypto-preservation facility in the US, the Cryonics Institute in Michigan, at the end of October. She is their 143rd client.
“It’s an unusual job to be running a cryonics organisation,” More told the documentary makers Galactic Public Archives. “It’s impossible to give a date to say when we can revive people.
“It could be decades, a century. We are like Leonardo da Vinci, who could design wings and a helicopter, but he didn’t have the tools to build them back then.
“At some point people will look back on the present and scratch their heads and wonder why we threw our loved ones in the ground or into these big ovens to incinerate them when they could have been preserved,” he said
More said that rather than having his entire body frozen, he planned to have just his head severed and preserved – a practice called neuropreservation.
Currently there are 149 patients at Alcor’s facility, including the youngest person to ever be cryopreserved – a two-year-old from Thailand – and also the US baseball star Ted Williams.
“It’s not about the fear of death,” More said. “It’s about the enjoyment of life and wanting more of it.” — The Daily Telegraph