Breakthrough: The Ideas That Changed the World

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Narrator

At the Aeronautical Research Institute in Germany, engineers are building a robot that they hope will satisfy that ancient dream. The whole idea of building a humanoid robot is to put the machine into the natural environment of a human. (upbeat electronic music) Our humanoid robot is called TORO which is an acronym for Torque Controlled Humanoid Robot. TORO is one of the only humanoid robots in the world that is able to explicitly control its torques in the joints so these are the rotational forces in the joints. (upbeat electronic music) Here we see TORO standing on a whole pile of mattresses and it's keeping its balance automatically. As you can see here it's standing freely, those straps here purely for TORO's safety, so in case something goes wrong with the experiment. But the straps are not supporting any weight. In the future we imagine robots and humans cooperating literally hand-in-hand. I can interact with TORO, pushing him, and he's automatically keeping its balance. To show you how well it's been balancing we'll just turn it off. See it falls and is held in the safety straps. (melodic music with bells) -

Narrator

In this experiment TORO will attempt to find a small airplane component and attach it to the correct location on a mock-up of an airliner fuselage. (melodic music with bells) So it's looking for the table, where this part is located on. He's doing it fully automatically. So he locates the part. -

Narrator

This would be a simple task for a human but for a machine, it is going to take some figuring out. (melodic music with bells) At first TORO makes several mistakes while it learns the ropes. (melodic music with bells) (laughs) -

Narrator

But finally TORO is ready to show us what it can do. (electronic rumbling) -

Johannes

Good job TORO. In the scenario that we test here, TORO cannot step closer to the airplane shell, so it has to grab on this handle here and lean forward. This is a particularly difficult task for a robot to do. (slow, intense music) Well done. (upbeat electronic music) -

Narrator

TORO might seem slow and ponderous today, but speed up the action by two or three times, and the future, a factory full of humans and humanoids working together is almost visible, even if there is a long way to go. Despite the recent advances, the real challenge is these things. These things that we have on the end of our arms are amazing devices. And we have not been able to build robot hands after 40 solid years of trying, which come to even 1% of the capability of a human hand. -

Narrator

Getting sophisticated robots into our homes and able to do useful tasks is still fraught with difficulty.