A Meinü robot is a Chinese
fembot that was reported on in Chinese news sources in 2006. In Mandarin, Měinǚ Jīqìrén 美女机器人 literally means "beautiful-woman robot" and is officially translated "beauty robot". The first Meinü was later named Miss Rong Cheng.
The unit is capable of locomotion, using visual navigation to avoid obstacles,
speech recognition
Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...
,
emotion recognition
Emotion recognition is the process of identifying human emotion. People vary widely in their accuracy at recognizing the emotions of others. Use of technology to help people with emotion recognition is a relatively nascent research area. Gener ...
(whether audio or
gestural is not stated), and speaking. It speaks English,
Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese ( zh, s=现代标准汉语, t=現代標準漢語, p=Xiàndài biāozhǔn hànyǔ, l=modern standard Han speech) is a modern standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the republican era (1912–1949). ...
and
Sichuanese Mandarin, and can recognize and respond to 1,000 words. It can tell jokes, sing songs, etc. It is intended for tour-guide applications, businesses and hotels, advertising, and possibly for TV-show hosting. Rong Cheng is 163 cm tall and weighs 60 kg.
Rong Cheng was sent to the
Sichuan Science and Technology Museum to be a receptionist or tour guide.
The first copy build cost was approximately 300,000 yuan ($37,500), but the inventors expect this could be reduced to a third of that if 100 were to be produced. Only one year of research was required to produce it, which suggests it was built upon other projects.
It was worked on by 10 researchers from the Robot Research Center at the
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. ChinaDaily's English edition named the principal designer as Li Chengrong, whereas Reuters and Sina English said it was Yue Hongqiang.
SINA English article
(also has a picture of the robot's internals, apparently showing hydraulics
Hydraulics () is a technology and applied science using engineering, chemistry, and other sciences involving the mechanical properties and use of liquids. At a very basic level, hydraulics is the liquid counterpart of pneumatics, which concer ...
)
See also
* Actroid (a Japanese gynoid)
* EveR2-Muse (a Korean gynoid)
References
Robots of China
Androids
2006 robots
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