English | EN Robot as passengers on a plane
Dec 17, 2014
“First-ever flight by humanoid robot Athena as a paid passenger on a commercial passenger airline @Lufthansa”
That’s the airport of Los Angeles tweeting about a robot checking in as a human passenger on a flight. Isaac Asimov would have loved it. Athena it is called. The first humanoid robot to have paid for a seat on a plane. It boarded a Lufthansa flight to Germany on december 15. The robot checked in and collect its tickets before being strapped into the flight. It is being flown to Max Planck Institute for Computational Learning and Motor Control Laboratory in Baden-Württemberg.
The robot was built by robotics company Sarcos and purchased by Germany’s Max Planck Society, which will try to make her perform tasks too dangerous for humans (like cleanup after the nuclear disaster at Fukushima). But meanwhile the robot was transported in “off” position and didn’t perform any task in the plane while flying.
Don’t get over excited.
The most important reason for putting the robot in a passenger seat was because it was cheaper.
Or am I wrong? Since the first humanoid robot that can actually fly a plane recently was launched. It’s called Pibot. Why would you take a robot to pilot another robot (the plane itself). Because it can fly any kind of plane. You just put it there, even if the plane hasn’t got an automatic pilot. It will be check-in, take a seat and fly.
http://youtu.be/8gnjh8uOAIs
What Pibot and Athena have in common is that both were initiated (or inspired so to speak) by the Fukushima disaster. If Pibot would have been operational at that time, it could easily have flown any kind of helicopter or plane close to the center of the nuclear power plant.
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