Hiroshi Ishiguro is a busy man. Between his two jobs, countless meetings and presentations, his demanding schedule was eating up all his time. So he built an android version of himself to pick up the slack. Ishiguro, a senior researcher at ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories outside Kyoto, has created a machine in his own image -- a robot that looks and moves exactly like him. It sits on a chair and gazes around the room in a very humanlike fashion, just like its creator. In fact, the robot is an exact duplicate. Ishiguro's silicone-and-steel doppelg䮧er was made from casts taken from his own body. Powered by pressurized air and small actuators, it runs on semiautonomous motion programs.It blinks and fidgets in its seat, moving its foot up and down restlessly, its shoulders rising gently as though it were breathing.
These micromovements are so convincing that it's hard to believe this is a machine -- it seems more like a man wearing a rubber mask. But a living, breathing man.But "Geminoid HI-1," as the robot is called, has another trick up its sleeve."Everyone, thank you so much for coming today," it says in polite but languid Japanese at an ATR demo Thursday, its lips moving to the sound. The voice is Ishiguro's, broadcast through a speaker inside his android double.Geminoid can be operated remotely so the robot reproduces the voice, posture and lip movements of Ishiguro, who wears a motion-capture system. A mouseclick raises a hand or finger.Ishiguro, whose job is teaching at Osaka University, an hour's drive away, designed Geminoid so he could "robot in" to his classes and skip the commute. As he steps out from behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz, standing beside his robot self, the shift is disconcerting.