The News
- Sophia, the first social humanoid robot is all set to participate in Vizag Fintech Festival.
Key Highlights
- Sophia will participate in the interactive programme with financial experts, regulators, investors and IT professionals at the Vizag Fintech Festival to be held between October 22 and 26, 2018.
- Vizag Fintech Festival is an initiative of the State government to create a sustainable and comprehensive ecosystem for the growth of fintech.
- Earlier Sophia visited India during a TechFest in IIT Bombay, World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT) 2018 in Hyderabad etc.
About Sophia
- Sophia is the most advanced AI-powered humanoid robot created by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics.
- Sophia also became the world’s first humanoid citizen after Saudi Arabia granted citizenship to her in 2017.
- Being the first social humanoid robot that resembles humans, Sophia embodies a slender nose, porcelain skin, high cheekbones, expressive eyes and a smile.
- Equipped with voice recognition technology and facial reading, Sophia has the abilities to express feelings and demonstrating over 50 facial expressions.
- She delivers speeches on pre-determined topics.
- Sophia has spoken about various topics including protecting environment, humanity, gender related issues, consciousness, future of robots etc.
The control systems used to operate Sophia include
- A script-based timeline editor which is used for preprogrammed speeches.
- A chat-bot that gives templatized responses based on context and a limited level of understanding.
- OpenCog, a cognitive architecture created with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in mind.
Humanoid Robots
- Humanoid Robots are those robots that are made to resemble humans in appearance.
- In general Humanoid robots have a torso with a head, two arms, two legs, a face with eyes and mouth.
- Recent humanoid robots perform human-like information processing using speech recognition, language recognition, reading facial expression etc.
- Androids are humanoid robots built to resemble a male human, and Gynoids are humanoid robots built to resemble a human female.
- Essential features of Humanoid Robots include
- Self-maintenance
- Autonomous learning
- Safe interacting with human beings and the environment
- Important mechanical devices of a humanoid robot include sensors and actuators
- Sensors are devices which sense environmental parameters like heat, sound, light, temperature, etc and physical and physiological parameters like movement, orientation, etc.
- CCD cameras, microphones, barcode reader etc are some examples of sensors.
- Actuators are used achieve motion and thus perform functions of joints and muscles.
