Oh, yeah! Robot joins Olympic torch relay, bashes through a wall on the way

By Mark Austin Published December 17, 2017

Robots were the stars of the show during day 41 of the Olympic torch relay in Daejeon, as a robot created by the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) carried the torch for a leg of the journey “without fear of cold or even being out there in his birthday suit,” as seen in the above video from Apirang News.

Even more impressive, Hubo took time out from his duties to cut through a brick wall while still holding the torch aloft. Hubo then passed the torch through the hole in the wall to his creator, Professor Oh Jun-ho.

Recommended Videos

The professor then passed the torch along to another robotic creation, this one a human-controlled “walker” dubbed the FX-2. A joint venture between the Hubo Lab and Rainbow Robotics, the FX-2 was built for the torch relay and revealed to the world for the first time. FX-2 is six feet tall and features two fully articulated hands with five fingers each.

“We aim to be the most connected and technologically advanced Games ever,” Committee President Lee Hee-beom said in a press release. “Today was a chance for us to show the world some exciting technologies that will be showcased during the Games.”

Organizers say it’s the first time a humanoid robot has carried the Olympic torch in the relay, although an underwater robot carried the torch during an earlier leg of the journey.

Hubo won the Robotics Challenge in 2015, an international competition held by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to evaluate disaster response capabilities of robotic technology.

Another local celebrity also participated in the relay: baseball pitcher Park Chan-ho (he went by Chan Ho Park when playing in the U.S.), a former All-Star who played for seven different MLB teams during his 16-year career.

During the games, South Korea will utilize 85 different robots to assist attendees and maintain the venues, according to Business Insider. Some robots will roam the airport, directing visitors to the various attractions in four different languages. Robotic vacuum cleaners, delivery robots and fishing robots will be also utilized.

The robot revolution will certainly continue, as Japan hopes to have an entire “robot village” for the 2020 Summer Olympics, complete with self-driving cars.

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Mark’s first encounter with high-tech was a TRS-80. He spent 20 years working for Nintendo and Xbox as a writer and…

Topics

Emerging Tech

A new startup wants to fix the military’s working-dog shortage with cloning and gene editing

Promising pitch, plenty of unanswered questions about the dogs.

a new startup wants to fix the militarys working dog shortage with cloning and gene editing warhound featured image

Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.

Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).

Emerging Tech

AI can describe a picture, but it still struggles to understand blind users

A University of Maryland study finds that Be My AI often buries useful answers in lengthy descriptions, leaving blind users to work harder to get the information they need.

Blind Man using walking stick

AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.

The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.

Emerging Tech

Etsy cracks down on AI slop listings. Everyone else needs to take note.

Now every platform must decide what counts as handmade.

Etsy featured image

Platforms tend to shrug off AI clutter until it threatens what they sell. For Etsy, that thing is trust in the maker.

To protect that, Etsy has banned AI-generated how-to guides and listings made entirely by bots. Most sellers must show at least one unretouched photo of the item (via Etsy Seller Handbook).