HUMANOID ROBOTS.

In the article, the author asserts that the future promises lots of robots in people's everyday lives, some, perhaps many, of them could look and behave like people but only if being humanoid represents a technological advantage over their relatively utilitarian counterparts. People have been interested in building robots in the form of humans for thousands of years. The modern era of humanoid robots was ushered in during the early 1970's by Hirokazu Kato, a professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. He oversaw the building of Wabot-1, a robot that could walk a few steps on two legs, grasp simple objects with its two hands, and carry out some primitive speech interaction with people. By the mid-1990's many humanoid robot projects were under way, most notably in Japan, Germany, and the U.S. The humanoid robotics group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of two groups in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory working on humanoid robotics, the other concentrating on bipedal locomotion, started out developing humanoid robots as a tool for understanding humans' use of representations of the world around them.