Robots in the Entertainment Industry: What are They?

Robots, in the popular sense of the term, have been serving as marketing devices for the best part of a thousand years. Though simple and semi-automated domestic machines hail back at least to the first century, the earliest known anthropomorphic robots enter history in the twelfth-century Arabia, when a precocious robotics genius developed an ingenious floating bandstand featuring programmable automata. These metallic musicians would apparently perform music at royal parties.

As manufacturing processes became more sophisticated over the following 800 years, synthetic humans and animals appeared more frequently, from Leonardo Da Vinci's robotic knight to Marvin Minsky's octopus arm, the University of Edinburgh's Freddy research robot and Carnegie Mellon's volcano-climbing robot crab, among many others.

There is something fascinating for us in the notion of creating more amenable robot versions of ourselves and of the more human-friendly sector of the animal kingdom. Perhaps it's a wish for a greater level of control than we experience with their 'real' counterparts, or that a humanoid robot's relative cognitive and emotional simplicity appeals to our nurturing instincts.

Whatever drives the interest, an amicable human-like or animal-like robot can easily grab our attention — a valuable commodity.

However, Spot is a very expensive piece of hardware to set loose in a casual environment, and it could be argued that, along with stablemates such as WildCat and Asimo successor Atlas, Spot's main purpose is to bring in new bespoke development business to Boston Dynamics and to generally publicize its range of services — not least to the military.

The US military, always a heavy investor in robotics, is set to spend $16.5 billion annually on robotics projects by 2025 (Statista) in the context of the forecast $102.5 billion total value for the global robotics service market (ResearchAndMarkets).

With spending power that's more or less ring-fenced against government cuts and recessions, military contracts have an edge over the volatile private sector, and are a powerful motivation for robotics developers.

However, lucrative military robotics contracts bring with them an ethical shadow that seems to have convinced Google's parent company, Alphabet, to sell Boston Dynamics to the investment arm of Japan's SoftBank in 2017, along with the lesser known Schaft robotics development company. By this stage, the company had gathered notable public interest through videos of its various prototype military robots.

In a debut similar to the floating robot band from the twelfth-century Arabia, car manufacturer Toyota launched its robotics venture in 2005 with an all-robot musical band at the 2005 World EXPO in Japan. Themed similarly to Asimo, the 'partner robots' played the trumpet and drums, and were to evolve in capabilities and appearance over the following 15 years.

Over the years, the central mission for the Partner Robots has shifted from any pretense of autonomy into the sophisticated remote presence systems. Impressive as it is, the T-HR3 scarcely qualifies as a 'robot' in the traditional sense, but rather acts as a remote exoskeleton for human operators.

Since its inception in 2004, the Partner Robot program was designed to cater, unsurprisingly, to factory production, but also to develop technologies for elder care mobility issues. Once again, the 'entertainment robots' that launched the initiative were loss-leaders for more serious intent and market ambitions.

Besides proprietorship of Boston Dynamics, SoftBank also produces one of the most famous entertainment robots of the last six years. At four feet tall, Pepper weighs 62lb and is designed to charm.

The robot has tactile sensors on its arms, chest and head, and features facial recognition, movement detection, a customizable voice, a range of ultrasound and laser sensors, the capacity to learn to recognize new objects, and a sentiment analysis system to gauge your mood based on your vocal patterns.

At an average sale price of $38,500, Pepper is about half the price of the Spot robot dog, with many more case studies and active engagements to its name.

Though Pepper is doubtlessly a promotional robot, it is also a viable product in its own right. Since its launch in 2015, the engaging android has sold over 12,000 units addressing a range of sectors and activities, such as a dancing entertainment device at a Palo Alto store, taking customers' orders at Pizza Hut in Singapore, serving ice-cream in Australia, and even fighting coronavirus with a roving public information service in Japan.

Besides Pepper's service as an educational aide in classrooms, the robot comes with a flexible API, making it a useful system for robotics researchers.

Priced at around 20 million yen ($188,000+), this android from Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science Technology (AIST) caused a sensation when first launched in 2009.

HRP-4C, aka 'Miim', has the official average dimensions of a Japanese woman, is 5.2 feet tall, and weighs 95lb. Eight motors in Miim's face allows for a limited range of expressions, while 30 body motors permit her to walk at an average human speed.

Miim was conceived with relatability in mind: the robot's creators prioritized a 'human-style' walk with all its redundant biological quirks instead of engineering the device to achieve a more optimal walk, which might have proved disconcerting in this context.

Despite her captivating appearance and general duties as an entertainment device, Miim was also conceived for '3D work' (Dirty, Dangerous and Demanding), as well as for research and development purposes.

By 1998, a new fever had broken out among electronic and car manufacturers to showcase their development and fabrication capabilities via attention-grabbing robots. Sony got into the game with the 1999 launch of Aibo ('pal' in Japanese), a line of robot dogs that captured the public imagination until its discontinuation in 2006.

In 2017, Sony revived the Aibo brand with the new ERS-1000 model, boasting a 64-bit Quad-Core processor, a battery life of two hours, and 19 separate axes of movement. The robot costs $3,000 and is capable of learning 'tricks'.

The new Aibo's facial recognition system can store up to 100 faces and respond to more than fifty voice commands. Since the unit's AI model is trained in the cloud, the ERS-100 requires a permanent internet connection.

Featuring 60 different facial expressions, Sophia is the culmination of a series of robot projects undertaken by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics.

The six-foot tall machine, whose name means 'wisdom' yet who pledged to "destroy humans" in an early appearance, may be the most successful marketing or entertainment robot yet created.

Sophia is the first 'artificial being' to address the United Nations and to be given citizenship of a country. The life-like robot, featuring AI-powered walking and talking skills, has also been featured in dozens of major publications and feted on a long chat-show tour in the west.

Although some privileged press reporting contends that Sophia's facial and emotional recognition capabilities are powered by neural networks, and that the robot's functionality qualifies as a rudimentary Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Facebook's director of artificial intelligence likened Sophia to the title character in The Wizard Of Oz — an impressive charade, but with little integrated power or autonomy. Even the robot's creator estimates her development at the level of a baby or toddler.

Though Sophia's schedule as an ambassador, marketing beacon and academic research tool means that she cannot be purchased directly, Hanson has released a programmable 14-inch 'little sister' related to the product. Described as an 'educational companion' and set for delayed release in 2020, Little Sophia will cost between $99-149.

Robots that are designed to appeal to us and to meet us on near-equal terms in our own physical space have a tremendous psychological advantage over abstract chatbots and other more practical and direct methods of communicating with AI. They are, to boot, born ambassadors.

Even if robots are difficult and expensive to create, the new boom in machine learning, NLP, computer vision software, and other robotics-related technologies ensure that we'll be meeting more strange creations in the halls of tech expos in the years ahead.