ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the snake-arm robot had its origins as an industrial robot, but its planned transition into a personal service robot, with all the social complexity that entails. A number of factors are converging here: demographics, the economic-industrial imperative to transplant military technologies to other milieux. Robots will maintain dangerous industrial machines, handle hazardous materials and monitor remote oil pipelines. The Humanoid Robotics division of Japan's government-backed National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology earlier had revealed HRP-4C, a walking, talking robot with a female face. A large proportion of the working day in industrialised countries is spent with computers and screens where the human-computer interface (HCI) is being continually refined and rethought for usability purposes. Bill Gates has said that personal robotics today is at the stage that personal computers were in the mid-1970s.
