RUNNING ROBOTthe FUTURE OF SPORT

THE FUTURE ISNOW WHY?!RoboThespian is a life sized humanoid robot designed for human interaction in a public environment. It is fully interactive, multilingual, and user-friendly, mak-ing it a perfect device with which to communicate and entertain.

Now in its third generation, with more than six years of continuous development, RoboThespian is a tried-and-tested platform, trusted by national science cen-tres, visitor attractions, commercial users and aca-demic research institutions around the world.

Flexible, functional and expandable, RoboThespian can be adapted and customized to meet your needs.

Modern life is defined by humanitys love-hate rela-tionship with its own technological creations. Its in our nature to see life, personality and intention where none exists. RoboThespian exploits this desire; it is an anthropomorphic machine, a dot on the graph that starts with automata, and will end when we are no longer able to distinguish the living from the mecha-nised. RoboThespian combines the appeal of a sophisti-cated entertainment package with the capabilities of a versatile research platform.

It comes with standard content, like greetings and im-pressions, to which you can add your own recorded sequences or bespoke content. With a web based in-terface files controlling movement, sound and video can be simply uploaded. RoboThespian was designed from the outset as a flexible communication medium.

Our team at Engineered Arts can work with you to produce a robotic partner for your research, enter-tainment or communication needs.

People have been asking us for a long time when we would make RoboThespian walk. From a cold, ration-al point of view, there seem to be very few commercial reasons to develop a full sized bipedal robot.

Assisted living and care are often put forward as appli-cations for walking robots. In reality, there are major technical barriers to overcome, particularly regarding safe operation around humans. Of course, there are some application areas where causing serious injury or death are not a concern. We could create a Termi-nator biped. Personally, I oppose the mechanisation of death for ethical reasons. I want to build machines that make people laugh, not cry.

But the question doesnt go away: Can it walk? Can it walk?

Who wants to see a walking robot? - I realised that most people would love to see it. And they can, in per-fect safety - at a show or public event. But just walking is not enough. It must run, jump hop and leap. To be worth its cost, this robot must perform like something never seen before. If it can do just 10% of John Travol-tas walk, Margot Fonteyns dance and Julia Roberts smile, we have a winner.

Achieving these goals is a daunting task. It requires not just engineering expertise, but radical and novel approaches to the problems of dynamic balance, ac-tuation efficiency, and locomotion.

We are creating not just an exciting piece of hardware, but one that will make a great development platform for others to build on. When Byrun takes his next step, so shall we.

Filip Dujakovi, V-223/12 Kompjuterski 2D Dizajn Univerzitet za poslovne studije, Banja Luka 30.01.2014.