A university professor becomes unwell the day before giving an important conference for which he has been working for a long time. He cannot cancel it because it is a relevant appointment, but it is impossible to be there physically. Instead of doing it through a screen, the teacher chooses to send his cybernetic avatar. He teleoperates it remotely, from his house, so that attendees can perfectly follow his conference, ask him questions and he answer them in real time. It’s not science fiction. Not even the plot of a movie. Not a scene from the distant future. It is a practice that is not yet common in Catalan classrooms today, but we are not that far away.
The Japanese engineer Hiroshi Ishiguro has already put it into practice in Japan, with the geminoid that has made him famous. Ishiguro leads a research project made up of 40 scientists from eight different groups with the aim of developing teleoperated and partially autonomous avatars and cyborgs that, in a few years, will also be part of our society.
Alberto Sanfeliu, professor at the Department of Systems Engineering, Automation and Industrial Informatics and researcher at the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (IRI), a joint center of the UPC and the CSIC, is the only international researcher who, from Barcelona, is part of the project. During a work stay in Japan, Sanfeliu came into contact with researchers from the country and learned about the Ishigon project, when it was not yet as popular as it is now. He has been establishing collaborations until last year when he was asked to participate in this strategic project for Japan.
Sanfeliu and his team develop the systems that will allow a robot to understand the intention of humans. Until now, says Sanfeliu, with the use of assistive robots, for example, it was people who adapted to the machine and there was a risk that humans would end up tired. “A robot must be able to understand the intention and interest of the person it accompanies,” says the researcher. He is then working on a new interaction model for the new cybernetic avatars that will facilitate the adaptation of robots to the lifestyle of humans in “the world of avatars and robots” that Ishiguro dreams of.
Although before entering the Japanese program, Sanfeliu was already studying this interaction with robots, he believes that it is “more logical” and it makes much more sense to experiment and develop it in this type of avatars. “It’s very interesting,” she says, “it’s a very ambitious project.” He sees it as the easiest way for these robots to become part of society, naturally.
To check the reaction of humans and their social acceptance, the Sanfeliu group is about to start a real project in the bar of the Faculty of Mathematics and Statistics of the UPC: a robot will be incorporated that will give consumers a conversation and will explain the offers, among others. It will be a way to study what coexistence will really be like and begin to improve the avatars that will be used to help people, like now the assistance robots that are already beginning to be more common in the homes of dependent people. For Sanfeliu, this “transition” is a “complicated and complex” moment.
It is difficult to predict a date when we will begin to see feminoid robots regularly in our daily lives, but experts believe that by 2050, these technological advances will have changed our lifestyles, so that we will have more freedom to choose the location. physics of where to be at all times. “The technology is already prepared, but there are ethical, economic and social aspects that have to be solved and that is why it will still take time,” says Sanfeliu.
A strategic project in Japan
Hiroshi Ishiguro, professor in the Department of Systems Innovation at the Graduate School of Engineering Science at Osaka University and director of the Robotics and Intelligent Communication Laboratory at the same university, has been the driving force behind the Avatar Symbiotic Society funded by the Japan Science and Technology Agency, within the framework of the Moonshot research and development program. He is considered one of the hundred most important geniuses in the world today for his research in this field and his feminoid – which helps him do class, for example – has become so popular that even Japan’s Minister of Digital Transformation, Taro Kono, has requested his own replica.
In Japan, the presence of humanoid robots is more frequent than in Europe in museums, stores and other equipment and facilities. Research in this sector is a country strategy because it is seen as a solution to the decrease in birth rates, the aging of the population and the shortage of labor.