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索尼公司企业顾问Tsugio Makimoto在2002年电气和电子工程师协会（IEEE）的国际电子设备会议(IEDM)上发表了基调演说，把像AIBO和SDR-4X这样的娱乐型机器人称作是半导体技术及其市场新的发展动力。

这次会议于2002年12月9日至11日在美国旧金山召开。

Makimoto表示，他认为除了个人电脑和数码家用电器之外，机器人也能发挥推动半导体技术发展的作用，随着半导体技术的进步，该技术也将变的越来越多样化。

Makimoto还表示，他期待在2040年前后，植入机器人的半导体处理能力将取得长足的进步，出现和人类有同样智能的机器人。

他还提到了美国卡耐基大学的Hans Moravec的预言，即那时机器人的处理能力将达到1亿MIPS（每秒百万条指令）的速度。

SDR-4X目前的处理能力是2000 MIPS或更高，配备有好几个微处理器以及其它设备，按照现在的性能，必须在40年内完成5次以上的巨大飞跃。

Makimoto认为，如果机器人按这个速度发展的话，到2050年机器人甚至能打败人类的足球冠军队。

据Makimoto说，为了满足未来发展的需要，半导体技术将开发各种传感器，以便监视视觉、听觉、平衡感以及人造肌肉等。

他还指出，SDR-X4配有Ball半导体公司制造的球状加速器，并且已经装备了采用微电子机械系统公司（MEMS）技术的各种传感器。

另外Makimoto还列举了开发人造肌肉技术的情况。他的讲话充满了幽默感，赢得了阵阵掌声。

英文报道：

Robots offer engineers room for creativity

By David Lammers

EE Times
December 10, 2002 (3:14 p.m. EST)

SAN FRANCISCO ― Twenty years ago, Tsugio Makimoto, then a Hitachi, Ltd. Semiconductor manager, delivered a keynote speech at the 1982 International Electron Devices Meeting about how robotics would play a role in semiconductor fabs, largely to transport and handle wafers in a futuristic fab.

Makimoto, now a technical advisor to Sony Corp.'s semiconductor operations, painted a much livelier picture of robots in a keynote speech today (Monday, Dec. 9) at the 2002 IEDM.

"Twenty years ago I was partly wrong. Humanoid robots are not very useful for practical purposes. Instead, robots hold great promise for entertainment," said Makimoto. Sony has sold thousands of its "Aibo" robot, which looks like a small dog, since June 1999. The new versions of Aibo are able to go to a charging station to replenish its own battery power, and include Bluetooth interfaces to share information with other Aibo robots, or with human-controlled computers.

But it was a seven-minute video of Sony's biped robot, the SDR-4X, which wowed the engineers attending the plenary session of IEDM. The video showed the SDR-4X, Sony's fourth generation biped robot, walking up and down steps, over unlevel terrain, and standing up on its own after being knocked flat on its back.

"Exercising cleverness"
Makimoto described the several dozen DSPs and controllers, with a total 2,300 Mips of processing power, that are in the SDR-4X model.

Robots offer engineers a means of exercising "cleverness in a much broader conceptual space" than just the traditional scaling of semiconductor devices in order to boost logic and memory density. Robots require optical, mechanical, and sensor intelligence to be married to electronic control functions, and Makimoto issued a challenge to today's engineers to embrace what he said was a coming revolution in robotic intelligence.

In ten years or less, the total robotics industry will reach $30 billion, he said, and will grow to rival the personal computer industry, he predicted.

He described a MEMs-based gyrometer with integrated electronics from Analog Devices Corp. that integrates a rate sensor with the surrounding electronics. Wacoh Corp. in Japan has developed a five-axis motion sensor that is used in the SDR-4X which includes a three-axis accelerometer and a two-axis angular sensor.

And Makimoto lauded work by Ball Semiconductor Corp., which developed a spherical three-axis acceleromter that correlates a voltage in response to an inertial force, a device essential to maintaining robot balance. And he described "telemetric skin" and pneumatic artificial muscles that are under development at the University of Tokyo.

"Robotics will play a locomotive role in the future devices of the electronics industry. Because robots need electrical, mechanical, optical, and sensing devices, they offer a much broader sets of challenges than just shrinking device geometries," he said.