Hacking the RoboSapien

unassimilatible writes "The RoboSapien is a cool humanoid robot toy with pretty decent dexterity and 67 pre-programmed instructions. But the folks at The University of Freiberg have made the RoboSapien autonomous by installing a Pocket PC to its head. The Pocket PC is equipped with a camera and communicates via infrared to the robot, and the whole monstrosity can be programmed with Visual C++. The full API is available for download. I, for one, welcome..."

Comments

Where does this end?

[museumpeace]

Eventually, a Linux-brained robot. Or maybe some open sourced flavor of VxWorks. Eventually its got a gas engine and 2 or 3 horse power driving hydraulic actuators. Strong enough to be lightly armored and do serious damage with its weight alone. It'll have a published standard sensor bus that enables dozens of open source daemons giving it such capabilities as a better sense of balance and maybe a RFID-based or face recognition software to give it a sense of friend/foe. I could program it to walk down to the gas station and use my credit card when it was hungry. It will be strong enough that I can program it to stack my fire wood and threaten the neighbors stupid dog. For that much utility, I would pay the ten or fifty thousand dollars that it might cost. Etc Etc. The question is, when does it cease to be a toy...
AT WHAT POINT DO I NEED A LICENSE TO OPERATE A ROBOT? When its capable of misuse? When its capable of harming other people? [Note Linux brain : I DO NOT need a license to turn it on or to program it ... ever!]