Among the passengers who boarded the Los Angeles International Airport on Monday was a robot, the first to ever fly on a regular economy class ticket on an airliner. Athena, this is the name of the humanoid robot, flew on a Lufthansa plane to Frankfurt, wearing a white T-shirt, black trousers and, particularly fashionable, a pair of red sneakers.
The robot was wheeled to the gate in a wheelchair, accompanied by a camera crew, photographers from major Los Angeles newspapers, and crowds of onlookers taking pictures on smartphones. Built by Sarcos, a Salt Lake City-based robotic engineering company, Athena was purchased by the Max Planck Society, which, together with the University of Southern California, is trying to build a robot capable of carrying out particularly dangerous tasks for humans , such as, for example, cleaning up areas contaminated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
“We don't want men and women to sacrifice their lives to do things like this,” said Alexander Herzog of the Max Planck Society. For now, though, Athena can do little more than sit and watch the world through sensors and cameras. The software needed to make it move, in fact, has yet to be developed. Athena seemed happy with the plane trip (she always kept the same smile on her face), which she spent sitting next to two Max Planck researchers who had come specially from Germany to pick her up.
Of course, it could have been shipped packaged in a box like any other electronic device, but the Planck scientists wanted to see how humans would react to the presence of a robot in a typical human context. “And then” added Herzog “a seat was cheaper”.
