Despite all the hype surrounding the release of a live-action Transformers movie, some people still are not familiar with the humanoid robots that can transform into vehicles.
“Transformers,” a film based on the popular Hasbro toy line and 1980s animated series, hits theaters Monday, June 2, for a pre-Fourth of July holiday release.
With the live-action adaptation comes the question: Are robots that transform from humanoid shapes into vehicles possible?
Immanuel Edinbarough, associate professor of engineering at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College, works with the latest robotics equipment every day. When asked about how possible it would be to make humanoid robots that turn into vehicles, he was surprised.
“My robots do not look like humans, because these are industrial robots,” he said. “Some robots look like insects, though. They can crawl.”
Edinbarough explained that robotics is a complicated field that combines knowledge of mechanics, engineering, manufacturing and computers.
Robots exist in cars, added William Berg, a fellow associate professor at UTB-TSC, but they are nothing like the stars of the upcoming movie.
“Cars have from three to 100 microprocessors in them, so a lot of things happen roboticly in them,” Berg said.
Functions like collision avoidance systems and radar-activate break control on newer models make real cars more robotic, but they are far from the robots of fiction.
“These are robotic, but they are not Transformer-style robots,” Berg said.
Originally a toy line in Japan, the Transformers of fiction are alien robots who disguise themselves as vehicles while waging a private war on Earth. The new film, directed by Michael Bay (“Armageddon,” “Pearl Harbor” and “The Island”) follows the same concept.
Berg believes Transformers will never evolve beyond fiction.
“It’s like the difference between art and function and a Transformer has no function,” he said. “There’s no need for a humanoid-looking robot that is not a toy. If you want a robot to vacuum your house, it doesn’t have to look like a human. … People get these ideas from the old cartoons.”
Edinbarough disagreed. After familiarizing himself with the Transformers concept, he said there is a possibility humans will make Transformer-like robots for space exploration.
“That makes some kind of sense,” he explained. “Someday we will build robots that have that kind of flexibility.”
They might not have the personalities, weaponry or stealth capabilities that the Transformers do, but robots that can transition between vehicle and humanoid modes would be useful when exploring areas that are too remote or dangerous for humans.
“It will be a very cool kind of application when it comes out,” Edinbarough said. “That may be the first step, to send a robot to Mars and pave the way for humans.”
Students in Edinbarough’s robotics course may not be building Autobots or Decepticons, but they are using cutting-edge technology to build and program their own robots.
This includes access to state-of-the-art manipulator arms granted to the university by the Intel Corporation. They can program and access them from the comfort of their home computers, just as NASA engineers can access robots on Mars from mission control on Earth.
Edinbarough said there are two important factors when programming robots: identification and movement. A robot must be able to recognize an object to properly manipulate it.
Recognizing an object by color and shape is a long way away from telling jokes or showing emotions, but he said artificial intelligence is still a young science. Someday robots could posses human-like understanding.
“That’s called advanced cognition,” Edinbarough said. “These things can be lethal and we would have to follow Isaac Asimov’s laws.”
Those laws, as shown in Asimov’s books and in the many films inspired by his work, dictate that all robots must not harm humans, must do as humans say and must protect itself, with each law being more important than the next.
Inspired by the new Transformers movie and by recent scientific advances in humanoid robotics, Edinbarough plans to help usher in real-life robots that are more than meets the eye.
“A robot that could take different shapes and do work like humans would be very useful,” he said. “I am thinking of making a project out of this for my students.”
