日本筑波大学研制出仿真婴儿机器人“代太郎”，为日本机器人家族增添新成员。上周，大阪大学展示了一款模拟爬行婴儿制作的机器人M3-neony，希望在人口危机背景下，能让日本年轻人体验育儿乐趣。日本是世界平均预期寿命最长的国家，但也是世界人口出生率最低的国家之一。这意味着日本人口数量或将急剧下滑。作为应对人口危机的措施之一，政府打算发起一场机器人革命，早先推出的代太郎和此次的M3－neony称得上是推动这场革命“先锋”。

M3 Neony is a baby sized robot. So far, it's "naked", so you can still see mechanical joints and lots of wires all over its body.

Neony is considerably more mobile than a newborn baby. It can pull itself up to a standing position, turn over and crawl, simulating motor-skills more characteristic of a six to nine month old baby than a new born.

Accompanying software designed by the project team, the baby robot is equipped with two video cameras, two microphones in the robot's ears, 22 high torque motors and 90 tactile sensors on its skin.

M3 Neony is one of a series of robotic children produced by the JST Erato Asada Project at Osaka University. Professor Asada Minoru, the director of the project team, explains that their ultimate goal is to create intelligent robots that can live with humans.

"Our aim is to create intelligent robots that can live with humans. To achieve this we have to understand humans themselves. In order to do this, we are suggesting a new approach to the problem in which we use robots to further our understanding of humans. This project focuses particularly on babies and children. By creating robots based on assumptions about child development, we are conducting scientific research from this perspective."

Besides Neony, the project team has built a number of robotic children. The most sophisticated robot of the series is Kindy. Around the size of a five-year-old, the robot can emulate emotions through a range of facial expressions.

Professor Ishiguro Hiroshi is also a key member of the Asada project team. He acknowledges that whereas human babies develop cognitive and motor skills very quickly, simulating these abilities in robots is extremely challenging for the engineers.

"We can make the hardware relatively quickly, but the software determining how the movement of this complex body is controlled takes a great deal of time. It takes a tremendous amount of computing power. On the other hand, human babies and children learn to control their highly complex bodies in an incredibly short time."

He also says he believes that the work the project team is doing will help scientists studying cognition or psychology to verify hypotheses about child development.

"So we are attempting to understand the extremely complex process of human development through the creation of robots. Scientists studying the brain, cognition or psychology, have presented various hypotheses about development. Verification of these hypotheses is extremely difficult. For one thing, they require constant observation. If however we create robots with programmes based on these hypotheses then we think that through the robots we may be able to create methods of verification."

Although growing in sophistication, the field of humanoid robotics is still in its infancy. How far the project's robots will actually help to unravel the mysteries of human development remains to be seen.

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