Honda to conduct demonstration of ASIMO as an autonomous self-explaining robot

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Honda Motor Co will conduct demonstration testing of ASIMO to verify the ability of the humanoid robot to autonomously explain its features while interacting with people. Working toward practical use of ASIMO to communicate with people, the testing will be conducted with the cooperation of the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) in Tokyo from Wednesday, July 3 through Friday, August 2.

ASIMO introduced in November 2011 was equipped with the world’s first autonomous behavior control technology, which enabled ASIMO to make decisions required to behave in concert with the movements of surrounding people and to continue moving without being controlled by an operator.

In this demonstration testing, ASIMO will autonomously explain its own features to guests visiting the Miraikan. ASIMO will communicate interactively by asking people questions they can respond to by a show of hands, presuming their intention and then explaining things in an easy-to-understand manner including gestures. Moreover, ASIMO will recognize the reactions of up to several dozen people by sensing their behavior using a network of sensors. Based on the recognition of people’s reactions, ASIMO autonomously determines how to explain things by making continuous judgments on its own, requiring no sequential commands from an operator.

Through this demonstration testing, Honda will verify the value of ASIMO as a robot that can autonomously explain things to people through a variety of pre-loaded explanations, leveraging the advantage of a robot, memory capability, by using multiple sensors to presume the needs of people and then explaining things in an easy-to-understand manner. Moreover, Honda will gather various data related to ASIMO’s interactive communication with people in real-world conditions, where the actions of people and the surrounding environment are continuously changing. Honda will feed back such data to future R&D activities.