500 years of humanoid robots automata have been around longer than you think [Resources_Review]

When science fiction critics Eric S. Rabkin and Robert E. Scholes argued in the 1970s that "no one would go through the trouble of building and maintaining a robot to hand wash clothes or pick up the telephone receiver," they were apparently unaware that Japanese researchers had already made a long-term commitment to develop humanoid robots that could do exactly that. The goal was to care for the elderly in the 21st century. To this end, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, industrial giants Honda, Mitsubishi, and Toyota, as well as university research labs around the world, began demonstrating humanoid prototypes. More recently, the desire to operate in disaster sites like Fukushima has motivated even more researchers to explore humanoid designs. But the dream of humanoid robots goes back much further than the 1970s. The Science Museum, in London, took a shot at plumbing this history with its recent Robots exhibition. (The exhibition closed in September, but it will be touring locations throughout the United Kingdom until 2019.) The exhibition is a visually dazzling display of human creativity and mechanical engineering from the 1500s to today. Visitors are welcomed by a blinking, stretching android baby, perhaps representing the infancy of automation displayed in the first section, dubbed “Marvel.” A video clip of an early Spanish automaton monk, some exquisite clocks, and an 18th-century silver swan automaton represent a period when, the curators argue, “likening the human body to clockwork...led to the creation of the earliest robots.” Well, maybe.