Review: A New Exhibition Shows That Humanoid Robots Have Been Around Longer Than You Think

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.