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Hardware

Robotic Butler available for $800 73

Posted by Hemos from the fun-with-machines dept.
Cy Guy writes "ZDNET had an article on CYE, a personal robot that will vacuum, collect dirty dishes and serve cocktails. " This is exactly what Rob needs-and if it can serve Bushmills or Jamison up, I'll be happy as a clam.
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Robotic Butler available for $800 More

Robotic Butler available for $800

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  • Humph. Windows?

    Is there a Linux version?

    I'll bet a Beowulf cluster of those would be ... well, pretty dangerous, actually.

    D

    ----
  • I'm sure there will be a number of /. readers who will use this device as a platform. Assorted other sensors and programming will sprout from the original device.

    Of course, if they publish the programming and communication specs then there will be Perl controllers in no time. And they'll sell more the cheaper it is.

  • another article on Cye (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://cgi.pat hfinder.com/time/digital/yourtech/0,2936,26790,00. html [pathfinder.com]

    It's from TIME magazine.

  • Re:Not there yet (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually, Homer dragged one telepod to the bathroom, and attempted to urinate through the other from the dining room. Attempted, since Marge stopped him. "Pssht. All it does is transport matter?!"
  • Hmm. The web pages mention openness. The communication protocol is supposedly available, and the interface jack on the robot also carries the RF serial data so that other devices can use the RF link.

    The web site also mentions a price of $700, not 800. I'm sure there will be a bunch of hardware hackers bolting various things to the basic unit.

  • "Is AI a dying field? I'm honestly curious."

    AI has been in fall-back-and-regroup mode since the early 1980s. Its germination was in the outlandish promises of the 1950s and early 1960s, when respected computer scientists were seriously predicting that computer brains would be in every way superior to human brains within the next decade. There were some remarkable successes (like SHRDLU [arizona.edu]) but these were few and far between.

    Prodded by more realistic thinking such as Hubert Dreyfus' book What Computers Can't Do [amazon.com], in the early 1970s everyone began to realize that the promises were failing miserably. It turned out that the human brain was terribly complicated after all and that we didn't understand much about thinking.

    So the "strong A.I." claims, as they've come to be known, fell out of favor and the industry has been working on less ambitious projects since then. Nobody's willing to try to write a General Problem Solver or a humanlike robot today, but when smarter programs on a million-dollar satellite allow it to realign its communications dish out of human contact, everyone agrees that's a good thing.

    If you want to see where the new wave of research into humanlike intelligence will be going in the next decade or two, start with Marvin Minsky's seminal The Society of Mind [amazon.com] and Daniel Dennett's brilliant Consciousness Explained [amazon.com].

    Jamie McCarthy

  • he tricky part would be the location, it could be determined by the number of spaces it has to take from a 'home base', but this has it's flaws, what if a dog came and started chewing on it, and left it 100 feet from where it 'thinks' it is supose to be.

    Then it "dies". In the real world, nothing has a 100% survival chance. It's one of the fundamental problems of AI.

    Mother Nature solved that with the firehose approach. That will be too expensive until we can manufacture robots that manufacture robots that manufacture robots.
  • The design may have changed since then, so this may no longer be correct, but the version I saw used only dead-reckoning (counting the revolutions of each wheel) to determine its position (and to some extent, whether it is stuck against an object), and had no other sensors (no bump sensor, no compass to sense direction, nothing to tell if it had tipped over or if the vacuum had become caught on the edge of a rug or a small pet, etc...)
    There was a nice paper in a conference last year about a robot that ran in museum somewhere (Bonn?), which used sonar in addition to dead reckoning - one of the innovations was that it could cope with being surrounded by people (which would block most of the sonar beams for extended periods of time).

    That way it could avoid both visible obstacles (ones that show on sonar) and invisible ones (which were on a map).

    E-mail me if you want the reference - I don't have it hand, but I think I could find it easily. (Disclaimer: I've only read the paper. I have no direct experience.)

  • I know I wouldn't. Especially the 10 year single malt! Anyone ever try the 16 year???
  • That's, I think, because the butler's "brain" is your $XXXX PC, whereas AIBO has a sophisticated internal robot brain. Still, my Mom was bored by AIBO (I keep hoping I'll make enough to buy one) but would probably like the butler.
  • In academia, AI is just a synonym for heuristic algorithm design; there is nothing "intelligent" about it. I can see two primary reasons for AI not progressing in the past twenty years:

    1. All the major AI researcher jumped ship into industry in the early 80's. This left the brainless, the unmotivated, and the senile to carry on AI research in academia.
    2. It isn't clear to anyone (except the all mighty Marvin Minsky with LOTS of sarcasm) that it is even possible to model human intelligence with a digital computer. It's a nice idea...for a philosophy book. Additionally, the human brain is so massively parallel that even if we had a "human intelligence algorithm," there might not exist enough digital computers today to run it.


    So, AI became a study in heuristic algorithms and machines that learn in a very isolated environment, and strong AI kind of fell by the wayside. Unlike foundational 70's research in cryptography, algorithms, systems, and even graphics, I'm sure we'll be laughing at 70's AI research a hundred years from now.

    --
    Kyle R. Rose, MIT LCS
  • I don't think you can look at this project and compare it with the robots of the 80s. This robot is an exercise in cost reduction, not a demonstration of today's technology. Also you seem to equate robotics with AI. IMO, they are 2 separate fields, and the intersection is much smaller field.

    Today's robots may not be anywhere nearer to being useful in a household environment, but they have been used in many new applications in the industrial world. Believe it or not, on my block the trash is collected by a garbage truck operated by a human driver and a robotic arm that picks up trash cans and dumps them in back. Robots are slowly taking over the manufacturing process and being applied to new labor intensive task, but as with other sciences, advances are incremental and breakthroughs are seldom. IMO computer chip industry probably has some of the most sophisticated robots and they continue to push the envelope, but most people just call them machines.

    AI is also alive and strong. It's hard for me to think of something that hasn't gotten better in the last 10 years because of AI applications. Weather prediction, speech recognition, natural language processing and translation, fraud prediction, crime analysis, traffic flow and city planning, CAD work (EE or otherwise), marketing and data mining, and on and on.

    Also, I don't think people are leaving the AI field as you say, but just stopping research and starting to put it to practical use. I know several people who have left lucrative fields to go work on AI-like problems at large companies. This is a sign that AI is picking up steam and has practical use. Previously almost all AI work happened universities and the results had very little real world use, now you can make $150K+ a year and there are recruiters specifically for AI professionals.


  • Drinking 10 year old whiskey is pedophilia.. You need something a bit more mature...

    Like 16-year-old Lagavulin...

    (If there's grass on the field, play ball! ;)
  • AI went through a spell, sometimes called the "AI winter", when it was hard to get support to do R&D (unless you hid the fact that you considered it to be AI -- lots of products, from games to elevator controllers, use techniques derived from AI to solve fairly simple problems). That's since eased somewhat, though as far as I know nobody's aiming at the Turing test right now. Nevermind having the intelligence of a dull chimp -- we're at the cockroach level, and accurately imitating mouse's brain would be a breakthrough

    Symbolic (traditional) AI got into trouble for two substantial reasons. First, the real world is a noisy place and you can never see all of it. So there is always uncertainty and ambiguity in the input, and strictly symbolic AI doesn't deal with uncertainty very well. Fuzzy logic tries to patch this, but it doesn't seem to scale very well. What's needed is to mix in some of statistics, which exists to cope with ambiguous data. One of the newer AI inference technologies does this quite nicely; it's called Bayesian Inference. (My work involves Bayesian inference, and I don't claim to be unbiased. It's works, and it feels right.)

    Second, AI needs some knowledge about how the world works -- a knowledge base -- in order to reason about its input, and building a knowledge base is usually a major project. Writing a knowledge base is essentially programming in a wierd special-purpose language, and the rest of the project may be as simple as writing I/O wrappers for a generic inference engine. (If you want to try it, get clips [slashdot.org], an expert-system shell, built around a rule-based inference engine.) Building knowledge bases is gradually getting easier, just as programming got easier after people had been doing it and building better tools for a couple decades. And machine learning techniques can do some amazing things, but with some caveats. How well it learns, and what it learns, depends on how you set up the learning problem and how you package the input. And I don't know how well the techniques scale.

    Cye is cute, but it has nothing to do with state-of-the-art AI. I'd call it a pretty impressive example of minimalist engineering. The gear-shaped wheels both give traction and minimize navigation uncertainty, and they use the motor fan blades as shaft encoders. IIRC, it has one board and two moving parts. I don't see why it costs more that $75.

  • err,,. i'm not sure about the jon katz style servant, hmm... i do believe i missed that feature.
  • $800, get real. You can get a mail order wife from either malaysia or russia for lots less than that.
  • Are we guaranteed that they won't rebel and revolt against their Owners in some post-apocalyptic manner?

    Kagenin
  • It seems that thanks to a particularly prosperous period in our history, we have moved away from creating useful things, to creating things solely for our entertainment. While that is not all bad, would it hurt to take this technology and turn it into something truly useful, like a robotic help for individuals who are bed-ridden, or other types of helpful uses? I'd love to see that.
    ------------------------------------------- ------------
    If you need to point-and-click to administer a machine,
  • Do less work? Ha. Not for nothing have I studied the works of B.F. Skinner - with a proper set of conditioning tools I can make anyone work like a champ. Lest you think this is an idle boast, I used to work for Kathy Lee Gifford - "encouraging" the Honduran schoolchildren that made her line of Wal-Mart clothing. I also did some consulting work for Nike in Indonesia. I was the one who suggested replacing the whips with high voltage cattle prods. I guarantee you that I can get a friendless, disoriented, barely fluent russian peasant woman to outwork any robot on earth - even the one on the 'Jetsons'
    --Shoeboy
  • yeah, but they quickly learn that they are about as useful as the robot and do less work ;-)
  • Here's an interesting paradox:

    You travel back in time with the intention of changing something. (e.g., to kill the inventor while he's still a child.)

    Therefore the inventor never made the "robot butler" and therefore you would not need to travel back in time. Therefore you don't travel back in time in order to kill the inventor. Hence the inventor lives and makes the "robot butler" so you travel back in time.....

    See? Is there any resolution to this? Perhaps leave yourself a note that says "Note to self: Travel back in time and kill this little kid. Don't ask why."

  • While this seems really nice, it doesn't seem to have much practicle purpose.

    My first impression was that it was a self guiding unit that navigate across a room and tow stuff...

    Well... it's almost self guiding (using a PC for a back end) but it didn't mention anything about navigation or adeptation. If I kick off my shoes will the bot run into them and get confused? It shouldn't be too hard to detect that sort of thing....

    Still... it seems like a remote controlled car being operated by a computer. You set in a predefined path and it follows it. You still have to attach the vacuum, etc...

    Still... I wouldn't mind having one...
  • So you're saying that hollywood has lied to me? I refuse to believe it. How could popular entertainment fail to be a completely accurate guide to matters scientific?
    --Shoeboy
  • >Cye can learn about its environment by detecting >resistance in its wheels. It keeps track of >where it is by counting the number of turns of >each wheel.

    So, what happens when you pick it up and carry it somewhere? Or when someone accidently pushes it? Or when a wheel slips? Then, it would have to re-map it's environment? That doesn't sound too good.

  • Re:Sounds good, but... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have nothing against posts like this, but I wish people that have been blessed with moderator points would hold off and use them more for "informative" and "interesting" when such posts show up. This way i am actually directed to a useful part of the conversation. If something is truly rolling-on-the-floor funny, go ahead, but hold off on stuff like this, please.
  • No, there's no guarantee. But if the robot butlers do take over, I intend to reprogram one and send one back through time and have it kill the inventor while he's still a child. While I'm at it, I intend to send my best friend back so that he can become my father.
    --shoeboy
  • The article mentions that Cye whistles and chirps like R2-D2. Clearly, the next step is your own personal C3PO -- for when you need a twittering yet comedic companion with a British accent. :)

  • When it can put the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, get a beer out of the fridge and bring it to me, ald hitch the vacume cleaner to itself, it'll be ready for primetime.

    Until then, it's like Homer Simpson with the telepods, dragging one upstairs into the bathroom so he can run back, sit in the chair, and then effortlessly teleport to the bathroom.

  • Do robotic butlers dream of electric sheep?
  • I saw this robot demonstrated about a year ago at a "Robotics Expo" in Boston. (and was asked to fill out a little card indicating my income and at what price I would consider buying it. I said $50. I think they said they planned to sell it for a few hundred dollars, but I could be remembering wrong on that one)

    The design may have changed since then, so this may no longer be correct, but the version I saw used only dead-reckoning (counting the revolutions of each wheel) to determine its position (and to some extent, whether it is stuck against an object), and had no other sensors (no bump sensor, no compass to sense direction, nothing to tell if it had tipped over or if the vacuum had become caught on the edge of a rug or a small pet, etc...)

    I asked the guy who was demonstrating it what happened if there was a bump in the floor, it ran over something (would change "apparent distance" as well as possibly direction), your pet/kid/you bumped it and moved it, etc.

    He sort of stammered and avoided the question.

    Never mind the fact that you have to hook the vacuum up to it (and remove it, unless you want your vacuum sitting out in the corner of your living room), pre-load its tray with drinks, and recalibrate its destination points every time you move a piece of furniture.

    Sigh.

    p.s. again, these are only comments on a demo version I saw last year

    p.p.s also at the robotics expo were Lego Mindstorms, some small solar robots [solarbotics.com], and NewtonLabs [newtonlabs.com] and their vision system (used on their winning robots in the Internation Micro Robot World Cup [newtonlabs.com] a few years back.

  • Isn't this the Asimov paradox? I always thought he was the first to say (or at least be credited with), "Time travel can't exist, because what happens if I go back and time and kill my own grandfather? Therefore I couldn't have been born, therefore I could not have gone back in time..."

    I always liked Heinlein's approach: there are no paradoxes. Because these things were invented means, by their very existence, that you didn't kill the inventor.

    I always like to wonder about the flip side, which is "What will happen if time travel ever is invented? How come no one has shown up claiming to be from the future?"

  • Are we guaranteed that they won't rebel

    "Open the Jamison's bottle, Hal".

    Ken

  • Note the "31337", which is $kR1p7 k1ddi3 talk for "elite".
  • M$ Whiskey? Screw that! For me it's Old Fortran or nothin'!
  • Actually the robot lawnmower has been around for about 20 years. The electronics have gotten better and cheaper, of course. This robot butler has spiked wheels for running on the carpet. I wonder how well it will work on grass.
  • Most people who look farther into AI than R2D2 and C3P0 will realize that digital ain't got the balls, analog's where it's at. What we need is more people out there screwing around with analog tech trying to get some robots. I heard of some expiriment where these folks wired together a robot that simulated the CNS of a small cockroach(via analog). They put the thing on the ground and it apparently walked a lot like a living thing. If someone finds a link to that article please tell me.
    And NO I'm not just trusting internet news to tell me that digital is bad. Have you ever tried to program a robot to autonomosly do something? It's hard as hell!!! My school built one of those lego robots for the "Penninsula robotics challenge" here in virigina, coolest thing i've ever done, but it was wild complicated. And all of the teams that built big complicated robots which had many moving parts lost miserably. Robots get caught in nasty cycles, I think this is what they ment in the article when they said the robot got caught in elecrical cords. We did win, but by a small margin.
    So what I'm trying to prove her is that digital sucks, at least the way we use it sucks, and we should give analog a shot.
  • Well, Eureka's [eureka.com] cool Trilobyte vacuum looks pretty useful to me. A single-purpose device, it seems a bit more feasable then something that is multiply tasked like robo-butler. And it's cute, too ;-).

    _____________________________________

    • The robot has feelings (that's why it's called AI)
    • He works for you and does not get paid
    • You paid for him at a store
    • He does not have the right to vote

    He will no doubt be upset about this (because he has feelings). He wants his freedom. Now change robot to "african american" and we are faced with a problem that we had 130 years ago. So i bet soon there will be a robots civil rights movement. A robots civil war. Robots will want the right to vote. So we give robots all this and they don't want to work for us for free anymore. And we are back where we started.
  • Intresting. The first thing I thought of when I heard of this was Blade Runner's "Replicants;" which may or may not date me ;-). The point remains the same, however: if one is building a true artificial intelligence, either hard code it with Isaac Asimov's Three Laws Of Robotics [evansville.net] or don't build it at all. Period.

    ____________________________________

  • Even this little robot cylinder thing doesn't do more than navigate a path through a virtual field. Nothing most slashdot readers couldn't code in under an hour. What ever happened to breathroughs in AI? Why are the serious researchers leaving it for other fields? Should we forget the dream?

    cye is not intended as a general ai solution. i saw the cye base in action at this year's aaai conference [aaai.org], and my understanding that the base was a proof of solution to a traditionally difficult problem in robotics - that of dead-reckoning (estimating your position based only on measurement of previous movement).

    dead-reckoning is difficult because carpeted floors, which are the default for most office environments, wreak havoc on traditional wheel-and-shaft-encoder combinations - that is because the fibers in the carpet introduce very tiny amounts of variation into robot's movement, but those variations add up really really fast. the insight in cye is the wheel design, which helps solve that problem (i don't remember the encoders or brains being anything out of the ordinary, though).

    btw, regarding "nothing that most slashdotters couldn't code up in an hour" - for dead-reckoning code that may be true. but i wouldn't extrapolate to other problems in robotics. i've seen many highly competent programmers getting their egos crushed by the sheer difficulty of interfacing a machine to the real world. it's a very difficult, and sadly largely underconstrained problem.

    r

    ps. and regarding the sad state of ai in entertainment - the times, they are a-changin'. check the july issue of game developer magazine (treebased medium, unfortunately) for a cool article on the state of ai in games, which also includes a few notes on the work between the entertainment industry and the academia.
  • Here's one that seems like a "garage level startup":

    Gecko Systems [geckosystems.com]

    In my opinion, however, I feel that home robots are still very much a hobby thing - and that we are far away from an "out-of-box" solution (unless you are willing to spend BIG bucks).

    BTW - Does anyone know what happened to the company Odetics (based in Aneheim, CA) that made the six-legged walking robot "ODEX-1"? Did they go out of business? What ever happened to the robots? Does anyone or any company own any?

  • It's a possibility...

    Can you imagine how shocked I was to learn that Homer Simpson, from the show "The Simpsons" isn't a REAL PERSON? He's actually animated!

    Wow! I can't believe they have the technology to make such a realistic person! And all that just to fool innocent viewers like myself.

    I feel hurt. Betrayed.

    *sniff*
  • I'm sorry Ken. I can't let you do that.

    Wouldn't you like MS Brand Whiskey instead?

  • Weren't they doing this back in the 80's? (Score:4)

    by konstant ( 63560 ) on Wednesday July 28, 1999 @11:50AM (#1778136)
    I could be wrong since I was only a littleun back then, but I strongly recall all sorts of hexagonal men and robodogs that supposedly would serve your drinks (how extremely...odd) and pick up your underwear. What ever happened to those?

    It's a sad commentary on the state of AI that we haven't much progressed in 10 years. All we've succeeded in doing is rendering the creatures a little more anthropomorphic in appearance (think Furby), but their base intellect is still that of a dull chimp. The mean processing power has skyrocketed and there are more skilled people in tech than ever before, yet Teddy Ruxpin is more or less still the undisputed champion of artificial brains.

    Is AI a dying field? I'm honestly curious. When I took my lone AI course in college, I was dismayed by the dronelike applications of DFS and BFS when I was expecting something a little more exotic. It seemed as though the professors lacked all spark of imagination - incredible when you consider the flare AI has made in the popular mind. And don't get me started on the affection these dodderers had for the sadly inadequate LISP family of languages.

    Even this little robot cylinder thing doesn't do more than navigate a path through a virtual field. Nothing most slashdot readers couldn't code in under an hour. What ever happened to breathroughs in AI? Why are the serious researchers leaving it for other fields? Should we forget the dream?

    -konstant
  • You can get a mail order wife from either malaysia or russia for lots less than that

    This is so charming. What a fun person you must be.

    -konstant
  • can you get my mother to start doing my laundry again? Perhaps get my father to wash my car and my gf to learn to cook and clean ;-)

    /me bows to the power...
  • I actually know a guy who got a wife from the Phillipines. He flew over there, spent 1 week scoring with underage girls, then went into some warehouse and picked out his "wife" out of 200 girls. Went to her house and met her family ("Yeah, I just bought your daughter"), then waited for 6 months for her to arrive. He was really excited and she was ok when she first got here. I haven't seen him lately, but I am really curious. It was his third wife and he looked like a 70's disco throwback. It was most humorous.

  • And i had my hopes up (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I really wanted to see what kind of patent you had so I checked out IBM's patent server at http://www.patents.ibm.com and searched for 14731337. No luck. ah.. I see 14731337 is really just your hand print on the numeric keypad..bogus

  • Maturity isn't enough, go for sophistication.

    Go for a 25 year old scotch.

  • Well, I'd certainly trust it with my Jamison... What the hell is that??? A poor copy of Jameson [jameson.ie] I suppose... Next thing you American lads will be calling it Whisky or something :o)
  • Who needs to buy this sorry piece of hardware for $500 when you can make one more efficiently out of Lego Mindstorms for $250?

    "There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

  • I have had this idea for a long time, but haven't had enough college class to develop it yet. Here it is:

    A small robot the size of a cig pack or less, build it will solar panels on it's back, a backup power system that can be recharged by the solar panels and a 'light' detecter on it's back.

    Program the 'logic' so, if there is light detected, it doesn't move. If there is NOT any light, it moves in a somewhat random direct towards N. Where n is a random number between 1-4, where 1 is North or up, 2 is south or down, etc, etc.

    This would 'somewhat' mimic mothernature. If it was hungary 'ie no light' it would move till it found food 'ie light' and it will stay till the food left.

    If there was light it would sit there and rechange it's backup battery, when it couldn't find light, say after sunset, it would roam the earth on it's backpack, till morning when at that time it would sunbath.

    Kinda cool concept, I figured out how to do everything, accept for getting enough engry off the solar panels to recharge the battery, which is important or it 'dies' every nightfall. Hey it has ABOUT the same life span at this point as one of those mai flies.

    After this is implentmented one could, program 'memory' into it. If light comes though this window between 7-5 it could remeber the time by DUH a internal clock or sportswatch on it's wrist.

    The tricky part would be the location, it could be determined by the number of spaces it has to take from a 'home base', but this has it's flaws, what if a dog came and started chewing on it, and left it 100 feet from where it 'thinks' it is supose to be.

    They could be programed with global tracking devices, these would work. But satelite prices are kinda high, and launching them into space, ha forget about that, NASA screws everyone on space launches, charging millions of dollars :(

    Do those palm pilots have GPA in them, maybe there is a way to disassmeble those ;)

    Just build this robot at of the shell of a palm pilot, not only does it find it's own engry source, you can also send it email. :)
  • Obviously, time travel has been invented and a time machine constructed.

    But every time someone defines a time travel theory which can be developed into a time machine, eventually someone working with time machines gets angry about their work and kills the inventor's grandfater.

    That is why we don't see any workable time travel theories. When they are created they are eventually destroyed.

  • Whiskey (Score:1)

    by dmr ( 22497 )
    Can these robots tell the difference between a good Irish whiskey and the legions of bourbons and midland-American whiskeys?

    Thank goodness you guys love good whiskey.
  • Robert Heinlein's _The Door Into Summer_ had an excellent "robot butler". Basically, a wheelchair , battery packs, a vacuum, and a tray. He used fictional computing components to get it to do what he needed, but I see no reason it is not reproducable with current (or even fairly old) technology. It's been almost a dream of mine to go into Mechanical Engineering (I'm a CS major at the moment) and build this thing.
    I'm pondering doing it with the Lego Mindstorms, for the prototype. ;] Maybe someone with more time, more current skill, can get with this, sell it, make a lot of money... and send me some. :]

    It is indeed sad how little the robotics field has moved forward in the past few decades, outside of the industrial area.

  • Re:Sounds good, but... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    While others fantasize about robotic prostitutes, I dream of electric sheep.

    --Tyrell905-b
  • Think this is cool? Maybe. But it's also incredibly ironic [whatisthematrix.com].

    --

    Michael Chisari
    dominion@beyondtheweb.com
  • Granted this "butler" does little more than scoot around through doorways...

    But it still sounds funny that Sony's dog AIBO [sony.com] costs more ($2500) than the butler ($500).

    Federico
    :-D

  • jon katz's definition of useful (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    click here

    Would Hemos could get ripped and whipped with two kinds of Bushmills.

  • Things are DEFINITELY improving (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The real problem in practical robotics is not AI in the sense of "make me a computer that talks like a human". It's dealing with interpreting a complex sensory environment and acting appropriately, even if the rules are very simple.

    I guarantee you there were no robots 15 years ago that could wander around a crowded building according to a floor plan, dodge people, and tell their own locations. I see them all the time in the lobby of Wean Hall, the CS building at CMU.

    Similarly Dr. Veloso's (world championship winning) efforts in robotic soccer (using Sony's dogs!). They use their visual arrays to orient themselves on the field, dodge other players, find the ball and shoot for the goal.

    Or Red Whittaker's completely automated combines. He runs a weekend farm in Pa (he's a full time researcher) almost entirely robotically. His robotic farm equipment can work at night, and with the elimination of human amenities and controls could be even cheaper than current equipment.

    I know less about "pure" AI. I've read Simon and Newell's work from the 70s (also at CMU, and I've met Simon, he's a cool guy). Anyone want to comment on what's going on as far as beating the Turing test with more sophisticated methods than LISP proggies?

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