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For all of Elon Musk’s huffery-puffery re: Autopilot, for all the noise General Motors has been making about Cadillac’s Super Cruise and Chevy’s autonomous Bolt EVs, and for everything Nissan has been gabbing about in the realm of self-driving automobiles, there’s just one car company that comes to mind when one thinks of actual, honest-to-goodness robots: Honda. And at the 2018 CES show, Honda is out to illustrate that its robo-ambition stretches beyond Asimo.
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The company’s 3E Robotics concept isn’t limited to a mere single bot. Nor is it, as one might expect, a trio of machines named Erno, Erokan, and Elvin. No, the 3E Robotics concept actually consists of four robots, all with different functions. The “3E” refers to “Empower, Experience, Empathy,” while the units serve a variety of specific functions.
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3E-A18 (above) reminds us a bit of those accidentally murderous Emojibots from the most recent season of Doctor Who. It’s built to display a variety of facial expressions to, in Honda’s words, “show compassion to humans.”
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3E-B18 is a mobile “casual” chair, less Professor X than some products on the market, and presumably more advanced than your garden-variety mobility scooter.
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3E-C18 looks suspiciously like a motorized Japanese beer cooler. Which is what it basically is, though the company fails to note whether its “multifunctional cargo space” is either insulated or equipped with a handy drain.
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Finally 3E-D18 is an autonomous ATV equipped with artificial intelligence.
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- Hype Machine: The Most Outrageous Predictions Issued on the Subject of Driverless Cars
- Major Kirobo: Toyota Launches Modern-Day Furby in Japan
- Honda: News, Reviews, Photos, and More
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Alongside the bot suite, Honda will unveil its Mobile Power Pack World, featuring a portable, swappable battery pack for EVs that also can be used to power a campsite—or, in the event of a grid outage, one’s home. As part of that exhibit, the company will also display a battery-exchanger concept designed to store and charge the packs. Think of it as a generator that doesn’t require gasoline. As for us? We’re gonna paint a Guy Picciotto eyebrow on 3E-A18, put on that Rites of Spring record, and revisit the birth of emo with our sweet new empathy bot. He is, after all, the only one who understands us.
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