Popular science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once equated robots to the “very best of humans” saying that there would be too little to differentiate between the two. That may not yet be true but humans and robots are getting more and more comfortable around each other.

Meet the HitchBot. This kid-size robot was conceived in Canada as a social experiment. It can't move by itself. All it does is sit by the side of the road with a thumb stuck out and, when someone stops by it, deliver a message saying it is hitchhiking towards a certain destination. The experiment was simple: can a robot trust humans?



Turns out, it can, at least in Canada. HitchBOT managed to make it across the country, from Nova Scotia to British Columbia after hiking more than 6,000 km on the open road, without anyone stealing or damaging it. On the way it attended a wedding, visited the sea and got painted as well. GPS, 3G connectivity and a camera allowed it to keep the world updated on social media. It then managed to travel portions of Europe too, and again managed to do so successfully.

And then HitchBOT went to the US. The robot had aimed to go from Boston to San Francisco, leaving on July 17, but this weekend an unknown assailant in Philadephia damaged it beyond repair. Creators of the robot were sent a picture of it after being vandalised, but cannot locate it because the battery is dead. Turns out, for now robots are not safe in the US.

Nevertheless, the fact that an immobile robot managed to achieve the feat makes it worth celebrating the vast improvements technology has made in bringing robots eerily close to humans both in terms of behaviour and functionality. Be it umpiring in baseball games or just serving you an egg sandwich, robots of the future are doing it all  today.

For home and office

In Japan, for instance, things have gone a step further with a $9,000 humanoid called Pepper being taken to homes like hot cakes for its ability to analyse, guess and even affect human emotions with its responses. It is capable of calling out people from a distance, tells jokes and performs all the activities that you would ideally perform with any other digital device from taking notes to automation.

"You look a bit thin," it cooed in a soft voice to Associated Press reporter Yuri Kageyama who spent some time with it and observed that robot gives you attention, which at times, could beat many real life people. "You should watch what you eat," the robot added.

Buoyed by the response to Pepper, Softbank has decided to come up with "Pepper for biz", a robot for enterprises that is scheduled to go on sale from October.

Robo receptionist

While everything is a little stranger than usual in Japan, you wouldn’t expect a mechanical dinosaur for a receptionist at a hotel when all you want is to book a room or two but that’s what one would get at the Henn na Hotel in Japan which is being termed as a “robot hotel” for all the right reasons. The hotel makes use of robotics with the aim of cutting costs and improving efficiency while exploring the possibilities of human-robot interactions in spaces where the two can peacefully co-exist and even help make each other perform better.

The porter, hence, is an automatic trolley which takes luggage up to the respective rooms in the hotel where your face will be automatically recognised by the door and you wouldn’t need electronic or mechanical keys of any kind.

While the talking tulips in the rooms might sound like a little gimmick that the owner is trying to pull off, the larger idea behind such a space is enough proof that the future of the human race is going to be very different from today’s reality, if not completely upside down.