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A Piece-By-Piece Guide to the Most Advanced Bots
XopherMV cuts-and-pastes from Wired: "In an article from Wired, 'Consider the progress of just the past 15 years. There are now robots that can get around on two legs, participate in simple conversations, and manipulate objects in rudimentary ways. Of course, we don't yet have a bot that can navigate downtown Manhattan, tie its shoelaces, or even tell a chair from a desk. MIT's Cynthia Breazeal holds out hope that within five years, robots will cross a critical threshold, becoming partners rather than tools - in other words, we'll have friends, not appliances.'" Reader ptorrone adds: "In Los Angeles, CA at the Century Plaza Hotel for the 4Site conference, our favorite robot vacuum/military supplier, iRobot, showed off the tactical mobile robot! The 'Tactical mobile Robot' has its own brochure and site: www.packbot.com. The rad thing about this platform is its skateboard design, where it appears to support various plug-in modules. Here are some photos of the packbot!"
I, personally, cannot stand people from MIT keep saying things like "robots will do this and that in so many years" Rodney Brooks (the current Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corp) came up with his infamous "subsumption architecture" in late 1980s and claim at that time that it was solution to legged locomotion control. Though, as far as I know he and his group has failed to show anything more than several slow and limited robotic implementations in the last 2 decades. This and similar approaches that claim to design controllers based on primitives (CNNs or Area, et al., or BMPs of Kirchner et al) all lack analytic framework. Hence ,the design process has a big hole in the middle which needs to be filled up by the intuition of the designer. The resulting controllers tend to be very complex and offer no basic understanding.
So, I find it rather comical to hear them keep saying "robots will roam the world in so many years." We are barely scratching the issues.
As far as I know the only thing MIT offers these days seems to be a robot that demonstrates some facial expressions(Cynthia Breazeal's Kismet). Big deal. [I know they are doing other things like COG but that project doesn't even address the locomotion issue] Without legs it wont be happy anyways. There are even some MIT people who critize these projects as waste of time.
If anybody it is Mark Raibert of MIT leg lab who made a siginificant contribution to legged locomotion back in early 1980s. I don't remeber him going around in publicity rounds and say robots will conquer the world. Such ungrounded comments can ultimately hurt the field. People are already quite edgy when it comes to technology.
Anyways, just my 2 cents...