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Scientific American Online Issue 14 2004 - 21st-Century Robotics
Scientific American Online Issue 14 2004 - 21st-Century Robotics
21 S T - C E N T U RY ROBOTI C S ScientificAmerican.com
exclusive online issue no. 14
Robotics in the new millennium may not yet have achieved the original goal of freely moving machines with humanlike intellectual capa-
bilities, but it certainly has advanced by leaps and bounds. Today’s machines not only aid industrial manufacturing, they can vacuum
our homes, stand in as pets, explore other planets and even assist in surgeries.
Bots of the near future stand poised to further impress. Think brain-machine interfaces that enable people who have lost a limb to con-
trol a robotic replacement with their mind—a feat that has already been demonstrated in rats and monkeys. Imagine a team of tiny
robots working together to inspect a collapsed building for trapped victims, or to spy on terrorists holding people hostage and relay crit-
ical information back to authorities. Robot designers in several laboratories are in fact developing just such millibot armies.
Leading researchers and journalists explore these developments and more in this exclusive online issue. Scientific American has a long
tradition of publishing articles by smart people for smart people. As you ponder the progress of artificial intelligence in the pages that
follow, consider the scenario envisioned by robotics pioneer Hans Moravec in his article in this issue: by 2050 machine smarts will rival
our own. —The Editors
TABLE OF CONTENTS
2 A New Race of Robots
BY W. WAYT GIBBS; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, MARCH 2004
Around the U.S., engineers are finishing one-year crash projects to create robots able to dash 200 miles through the Mojave Desert in a
day, unaided by humans. Scientific American tailed the odds-on favorite team for 10 months and found that major innovations in robot-
ics are not enough to win such a contest. Obsession is also required
CONS U M E R ROBOT S
33 Plug-and-Play Robots BY W. WAYT GIBBS; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, APRIL 2004
Personal robots may soon be as cheap and customizable as personal computers
A New Race of
ROBOTS
Around the U.S., engineers are finishing one-year crash projects to create
robots able to dash 200 miles through the Mojave Desert in a day, unaided
by humans. Scientific American tailed the odds-on favorite team for 10
months and found that major innovations in robotics are not enough to win
such a contest. Obsession is also required
BY W. WAYT GIBBS
PITTSBURGH, DECEMBER 10, 2003: A cold rain blows sideways through the
night into the face of Chris Urmson as he frets over Sandstorm, the robotic vehicle
idling next to him on an overgrown lot between two empty steel mills. Urmson checks
a tarp protecting the metal cage full of computers and custom electronics that serves
as the sensate head of the chimeric robot, which has the body of an old Marine Corps
Humvee. His ungloved hands shivering and his body aching from three sleep-deprived
days and nights of work in the field, Urmson stares glumly at the machine and weighs
his options. None of them are good.
The Competitors
MORE THAN 100 TEAMS registered for the Grand Challenge; 86 sent technical applications to DARPA, which approved 45. DARPA
officials later culled the field to 25 vehicles, which fall into roughly four categories. No more than 20 will be allowed to race.
Digital Auto Drive, Insight Racing, Navigators, Overbot, radius; relatively slow acceleration and braking.
Palos Verdes Road Warriors Teams: The Red Team, Terramax
Planning to Win
THE RED TEAM concluded early on that the most feasible way to an enormous geographic database several terabytes in size.
win the race is to give the Sandstorm robot an extremely A computer program can use this database to calculate the
detailed and accurate navigational plan to guide it over the race “cost” for Sandstorm to traverse every square meter in the
route. The exact course will be held secret until two hours before region. Some areas, such as cliffs or course boundaries, have an
the starting gun, however. So the team has spent thousands of infinite cost because they would disable or disqualify the racer.
hours assembling maps, models and aerial imagery of the entire Dry lake beds, in contrast, might have a cost of zero.
potential race area, which spans 400 times the area shown in On race day, the actual course data (simulated below as
this illustration. The engineers overlay, align and hand-correct circles and blue lines) will be sent through a high-speed link to
several distinct views of the terrain. the Red Team’s control center. There a fleet of computers will
From the U.S. Geological Survey, the team obtained use the cost map to compute the optimal route. A dozen or more
relatively rough three-dimensional profiles of the land and trained volunteers will then divide the route into sections and
aerial photography that can distinguish objects as small as will tweak the computed plan as needed so that it does not
one meter. To these they add custom-made road and mistakenly send Sandstorm into harm’s way. The final
vegetation maps, then fuse these layers of information into navigation instructions (yellow dots) will be beamed to the
robot shortly before the race begins.
ROADS AND
VEGETATION
COMPOSITE
ROUTE MAP
AERIAL
IMAGERY
W. WAYT GIBBS; SOURCES: USGS, THE RED TEAM
TERRAIN
ELEVATION
MODEL
3 miles
3-Ghz dual-processor
Xeon computers
Applanix
navigation
computer
Four-processor
Itanium2 computer
Heavy-duty
Ultraprecise
shock absorbers
odometer
2. PERCEIVING AN OBSTACLE
Sandstorm uses four kinds of sensors to look for obstacles (a).
A long-range laser traces the profile of the terrain 50 times a
5-kilowatt
second. Successive profiles build up to form a 3-D model (b). Mechron diesel
Shorter-range lasers also cover all sides of the vehicle. generator
A stereo camera sends video to a dedicated computer that
estimates the slope and roughness of the ground. A rotating Electronics box Radiator
(E-box) guard
radar antenna will pick up obstructions (c) even when dust or
glare blinds the other sensors.
a LONG-RANGE LASER
RADAR 10- to 350-meter range;
10- to 100-meter range STEREO CAMERA default focus at 50 meters
30-meter range b c
Vegetation Car
Trail
SHORT-RANGE LASER
10- to 30-meter range
trail” (d, yellow dots) passes through high-cost territory (red areas). If
at the end of the meeting. Up go a roomful of hands.
so, the planner program prices alternative routes (blue arcs) and shifts
the breadcrumbs to the shortest safe path (e).
Senior writer W. Wayt Gibbs has been in Pittsburgh covering
d e the progress of the Red Team since March 2003.
Preplanned Corrected
route route
Obstacle
MORE TO E XPLORE
The Red Team Web site: redteamracing.org
Alternate
routes For links to other teams: www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/teams.htm
For more information on the Grand Challenge race:
www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/
THE SPIRIT OF
A
t 8:15 P.M. Pacific time on January 3, the Spirit rover, succeeded. But the blunders that damned the Mars Climate Or-
tucked inside its protective capsule, separated from its biter in 1999— neglecting to convert imperial to metric units,
interplanetary mother ship and prepared to enter the then failing to diagnose the error when the spacecraft kept drift-
atmosphere of Mars. For weeks, mission engineers and scien- ing off course— are hard to live down. And just a week before
tists had been listing in grim detail everything that could go Spirit reached Mars, the British Beagle 2 lander bounded into
wrong. Explosive bolts might not blow on time; strong winds the Martian atmosphere never to be heard from again.
might slam the capsule against the ground; the lander might Controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ( JPL) have
settle with its nose down, wedged helplessly between rocks; ra- a tradition of opening a bag of peanuts for good luck, and the
dio links might fail. As the final days ticked by, a dust storm on moment had come to do so. At 8:29 P.M., Spirit started its mete-
the planet erupted, reducing the density of the upper atmo- oric descent. (To be precise, that is when the confirmation signal
sphere. To compensate, controllers reprogrammed the para- reached Earth. By then, Spirit had already landed on Mars; the
chute to deploy earlier. Eight hours before the capsule’s entry, only question was whether it had landed in one piece or in many.)
deputy mission manager Mark Adler said, “We’re sending a Within two minutes, the lander had survived the peak atmo-
complicated system into an unknown environment at very high spheric heating and maximum g-force. After another two min-
speed. I feel calm. I feel ready. I can only conclude it’s because utes, it deployed its chute and emerged from its capsule. Two
I don’t have a full grasp of the situation.” minutes later its cushion of air bags inflated and controllers an-
This candid doom-mongering was reassuring. If the team nounced, “We have signs of bouncing on the surface of Mars.”
had said there was nothing to worry about, it would have been The control room became a blur of cheering and hugging.
time to start worrying. Between 1960 and 2002 the U.S., Rus- It didn’t take long, though, for people to wonder whether they
sia and Japan sent 33 missions to the Red Planet. Nine made it. had cheered and hugged too soon. The radio signal had flat-
By the standards of planetary exploration, the failure rate is not lined. Rob Manning, the leader of the group that devised the
unusually high: of the first 33 missions to the moon, only 14 landing sequence, recalls: “The signal disappeared. That
COPYRIGHT 2004 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC.
A
HIGH-GAIN LOW-GAIN DIRECTION OF FIRST
ANTENNA ANTENNA LONG JOURNEY
NASA’s rover fights the curse of the Angry Red Planet
BY GEORGE MUSSER
EXPLORATION
caused us some pause. I was trying to act calm. It was nerve-
wracking.” Up until then, he says, the entry had felt just like
struments, has been trying to get to Mars for 17 years. The Cor-
nell University professor has something of a wunderkind repu-
one of the team’s many test runs. “It was only when the signal tation. He did his Ph.D. from start to finish in three years and,
started going away that I said, ‘Uh-oh, this is not a rehearsal.’” during the 1980s, became an expert on half the solid bodies of
Engineers had warned that Spirit might go silent for 10 min- the solar system, from the icy satellites of Jupiter to the volcanic
utes or so until it rolled to a stop. A tumbling lander does not plains of Venus to the water-cut highlands of Mars. But he came
make a good transmission platform. But the 10th minute came to feel that his career was missing something.
and went without contact, then the 11th and the 12th. People “The real advances in our business come from people who
swiveled in their chairs, crossed their arms, chewed gum. A thin build instruments and put them on spacecraft and send them
jittery line, representing radio static, ran across the bottom of to the planets,” he says. “I worked on Voyager; I worked on
controllers’ computer screens. Manning says he was watching Magellan. I didn’t think of those missions, I didn’t design those
the bottom of his screen so intently that it took him a moment instruments, I didn’t calibrate them. I just parachuted in at the
to notice when the line jumped to the top. At 8:52 P.M., or 2:51 end, scooped up some data and went off and wrote a bunch of
P.M. local time at the landing site, Spirit proclaimed its safe ar- papers. It was a very enjoyable, satisfying way to do a career,
rival on the Red Planet. in a lot of respects, but I did feel that I was profiting by the ef-
NASA/JPL/CORNELL UNIVERSITY
forts of others. For just once— and it is going to be just once;
Squyres’s Odyssey this is an experience neither to be missed nor repeated— for just
LIKE SAILORS ROUNDING Cape Horn, scientists and en- once I wanted to do one where at the end I could say, You
gineers willingly put themselves in the capricious hands of fate
EASTERN PANORAMA from the Spirit landing site runs from due north at the
for a reason: to put life on our planet into context, either as a left to due south at the right. The first major goal of the rover is to reach a
singular phenomenon or as an exemplar of a universal process. crater about 250 meters to the northeast. Later it could drive toward the East
Steve Squyres, principal investigator of the rover’s scientific in- Hills, which lie three to four kilometers away and are about 100 meters high.
B C D E F G
EAST HILL COMPLEX COPYRIGHT 2004 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC. SOUTH MESAS 1 & 2
HUMANITY’S NEW BEACHHEAD ON MARS
SPIRIT’S LANDING SITE, Gusev Crater, is only the fourth place on identified on the Red Planet. The landing sites of the ill-fated Beagle
Mars that humans have seen in any detail. The crater lies on the 2 and of Opportunity, Spirit’s twin, may also have been ancient lakes.
boundary between the southern highlands and northern plains. The earlier Mars Pathfinder rover roamed the mouth of a large
It is one of half a dozen possible lake beds that scientists have outflow channel. The Viking landers set down on featureless plains.
90˚N
60˚N
VIKING 2
(UTOPIA PLANITIA)
30˚N
VIKING 1
(CHRYSE PLANITIA) MARS PATHFINDER
(ARES VALLIS) BEAGLE 2
(ISIDIS PLANITIA)
0˚ OPPORTUNITY
(MERIDIANI PLANUM)
SPIRIT
(GUSEV CRATER )
30˚S
60˚S
90˚S
180˚W 90˚W 0˚ 90˚E 180˚E
13˚S GUSEV CRATER is just north of Ma’adim Vallis, a canyon 900
a
kilometers long. The regional view (a) shows topography
(colors) and strips of high-resolution images. The high density
POSSIBLE OUTFLOW of craters implies an ancient terrain, perhaps four billion years
(WALL BREACH) old. Mosaics of high- and low-resolution images (b, c) zoom in
14˚S on the landing site. The ellipses represent the targeted
GUSEV CRATER landing area (which changed slightly over time); the yellow
lines are sight lines from the rover’s initial position.
m_
1531
_ 1131
c NORTH HILL
15˚S
NASA/JPL/MALIN SPACE SCIENCE SYSTEMS; NASA PLANETARY DATA SYSTEM (top view)
_ 731 NORTHWEST HILL
POSSIBLE DELTA REMNANTS _ 331
_ –69
_ –469
16˚S _ –869
_ –1269
MA
_ –1669 LANDING
’AD
20 km _ –2469
IS
b
DUST DEVIL SOUTH
TRAILS POSSIBLE SOUTHWEST HILL
CRATER LAKE
LANDING SITE
SOUTH MESAS
5 km 5 km
RETROROCKET FIRING
BOUNCING
PETAL OPENING
ROLL-OFF ROVER PREPARATION
SMOOTH ROCK SURFACES may have been EAST HILLS E (left) and F (right) were imaged several hours apart, showing how dust affects the
polished by windblown sand grains. This is one visibility. The atmosphere above Gusev is dustier than predicted; consequently, the rover is warmer
of the first color images taken by Spirit. but has less solar power. Hill E is 3.1 kilometers away, and F is 4.2 kilometers away.
NASA/JPL/ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY/CORNELL UNIVERSITY (bottom right)
DRAG MARKS, left by the air bags as they were THERMAL SCAN shows the area from the East Hill Complex to Sleepy Hollow. Dust is warmer (red)
retracted, indicate a cohesive soil— perhaps because it has a low thermal inertia, which means it heats up quickly in the sun. Rocks, with their higher
electrostatically charged dust or a weakly thermal inertia, stay cooler (blue). Other data from the infrared spectrometer reveal magnesium
cemented “duricrust” like that seen by Viking. carbonate and hydrated minerals, but no one yet knows what it means for the history of water at Gusev.
NASA/JPL/CORNELL UNIVERSITY
ABOUT THREE HOURS after Spirit landed, at 11:30 P.M. “The chances it will be perfect again are not good.” But he adds,
Pacific time on January 3, the data started to pour in, relayed “The chances that it will not work at all are also low.” And that,
by the Odyssey orbiter. For observers used to earlier missions, in the business of planetary science, is a victory.
when images slowly built up line by line like a curtain rising
on another world, it was startling. The first pictures flashed up George Musser, a staff writer, was a graduate student of
on the screen, and Gusev Crater leapt into the control room. Steve Squyres’ in the early 1990s. For updates on the Spirit
The main cameras sit on a mast 1.5 meters tall, so the view and Opportunity missions, see www.sciam.com
SASHIMI SUSHI
DIRECTION OF ROLL-OFF
People with nerve or limb injuries may one day be able to command wheelchairs,
prosthetics and even paralyzed arms and legs by “thinking them through” the motions
By Miguel A. L. Nicolelis and John K. Chapin
Belle, our tiny owl monkey, was seated in her special chair
inside a soundproof chamber at our Duke University labora- the tiny action potentials produced by her brain cells. Our lab
tory. Her right hand grasped a joystick as she watched a hori- computer would convert the electrical patterns into instructions
zontal series of lights on a display panel. She knew that if a light that would direct the robot arm. Six hundred miles north, in
suddenly shone and she moved the joystick left or right to cor- Cambridge, Mass., a different computer would produce the
respond to its position, a dispenser would send a drop of fruit same actions in another robot arm, built by Mandayam A.
juice into her mouth. She loved to play this game. And she was Srinivasan, head of the Laboratory for Human and Machine
good at it. Haptics (the Touch Lab) at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
Belle wore a cap glued to her head. Under it were four plas- nology. At least, that was the plan.
tic connectors. The connectors fed arrays of microwires— each If we had done everything correctly, the two robot arms
wire finer than the finest sewing thread— into different regions would behave as Belle’s arm did, at exactly the same time. We
of Belle’s motor cortex, the brain tissue that plans movements would have to translate her neuronal activity into robot com-
and sends instructions for enacting the plans to nerve cells in mands in just 300 milliseconds— the natural delay between the
the spinal cord. Each of the 100 microwires lay beside a single time Belle’s motor cortex planned how she should move her
motor neuron. When a neuron produced an electrical dis- limb and the moment it sent the instructions to her muscles. If
charge— an “action potential”— the adjacent microwire would the brain of a living creature could accurately control two dis-
capture the current and send it up through a small wiring bun- similar robot arms— despite the signal noise and transmission
dle that ran from Belle’s cap to a box of electronics on a table delays inherent in our lab network and the error-prone Inter-
next to the booth. The box, in turn, was linked to two com- net— perhaps it could someday control a mechanical device or
puters, one next door and the other half a country away. actual limbs in ways that would be truly helpful to people.
In a crowded room across the hall, members of our research Finally the moment came. We randomly switched on lights
team were getting anxious. After months of hard work, we in front of Belle, and she immediately moved her joystick back
were about to test the idea that we could reliably translate the and forth to correspond to them. Our robot arm moved simi-
raw electrical activity in a living being’s brain— Belle’s mere larly to Belle’s real arm. So did Srinivasan’s. Belle and the ro-
thoughts— into signals that could direct the actions of a robot. bots moved in synchrony, like dancers choreographed by the
Unknown to Belle on this spring afternoon in 2000, we had as- electrical impulses sparking in Belle’s mind. Amid the loud cel-
sembled a multijointed robot arm in this room, away from her ebration that erupted in Durham, N.C., and Cambridge, we
view, that she would control for the first time. As soon as Belle’s could not help thinking that this was only the beginning of a
brain sensed a lit spot on the panel, electronics in the box run- promising journey.
ning two real-time mathematical models would rapidly analyze In the two years since that day, our labs and several others
Overview/Brain Interfaces
■ Rats and monkeys whose brains have been wired to a
computer have successfully controlled levers and robot Belle in
arms by imagining their own limb either pressing a bar laboratory
room in
or manipulating a joystick. Durham, N.C.
■ These feats have been made possible by advances in
The box collected, filtered and amplified the signals and would take (c) and converted that information into commands for
relayed them to a server computer in a room next door. The producing the same motion in a robot arm. Then the computer
signals received by the box can be displayed as a raster plot (b); sent commands to a computer that operated a robot arm in a room
each row represents the activity of a single neuron recorded over across the hall. At the same time, it sent commands from our
time, and each color bar indicates that the neuron was firing at a laboratory in Durham, N.C., to another robot in a laboratory
given moment. hundreds of miles away. In response, both robot arms moved in
The computer, in turn, predicted the trajectory that Belle’s arm synchrony with Belle’s own limb. — M.A.L.N. and J.K.C.
Wrist
b
ou
gh
wi
ern nt
re
et
Int l se
via gna
Si
Raster plot
c
Server in room
next door to Belle’s
Y
BRYAN CHRISTIE DESIGN
Ethernet X Z
Harvey box
Predicted arm trajectory
more than a decade. Nicolelis, a native of Brazil, received his M.D. onds ahead of time. This discovery was made by Johan Wess-
and Ph.D. in neurophysiology from the University of São Paulo. Af- berg of Duke, now at the Gothenburg University in Sweden.
ter postdoctoral work at Hahnemann University, he joined Duke The main trick was for the computer to continuously combine
University, where he now co-directs the Center for Neuroengineer- neuronal activity produced as far back in time as one second to
ing and is professor of neurobiology, biomedical engineering, and best predict movements in real time.
psychological and brain sciences. Chapin received his Ph.D. in neu- As our scientific work proceeded, we acquired a more ad-
rophysiology from the University of Rochester and has held facul- vanced Harvey box from Plexon. Using it and some custom,
ty positions at the University of Texas and the MCP Hahnemann real-time algorithms, our computer sampled and integrated the
University School of Medicine (now Drexel University College of Med- action potentials every 50 to 100 milliseconds. Software trans-
icine). He is currently professor of physiology and pharmacology lated the output into instructions that could direct the actions of
at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center. a robot arm in three-dimensional space. Only then did we try to
SMALL ROBOTS
FOR ROBOT DESIGNERS THESE DAYS, SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL
A
group of terrorists has stormed into an office building out toxic materials. For now, these scenarios— let alone the life-
and taken an unknown number of people hostage. They like robots depicted in science-fiction movies such as Minority Re-
have blocked the entrances and covered the windows. No port— remain well beyond the state of the art. Yet the vision of
one outside can see how many they are, what weapons they car- mini robots has captured the attention of leading robot designers.
ry or where they are holding their hostages. But suddenly a SWAT Rather than concentrate on a few large platforms bristling with
team bursts into the room and captures the assailants before they sensors (like Swiss Army knives on wheels), the focus these days
can even grab their weapons. How did the commandos get the is shifting toward building fleets of small, light and simple robots.
information they needed to move so confidently and decisively? In principle, lilliputian robots have numerous advantages
The answer is a team of small, coordinated robots. They in- over their bulkier cousins. They can crawl through pipes, inspect
filtrated the building through the ventilation system and me- collapsed buildings and hide in inconspicuous niches. A well-
thodically moved throughout the ducts. Some were equipped organized group of them can exchange sensor information to map
with microphones to monitor conversations, others with small objects that cannot be easily comprehended from a single van-
video cameras, still others with sensors that sniffed the air for tage point. They can come to the aid of one another to scale ob-
chemical or biological agents. Working together, they radioed stacles or recover from a fall. Depending on the situation, the team
this real-time information back to the authorities. leader can send in a bigger or smaller number of robots. If one
This is roughly the scenario that the Defense Advanced Re- robot fails, the entire mission is not lost; the rest can carry on.
search Projects Agency (DARPA) presented to robotics researchers But diminutive robots require a new design philosophy. They
in 1998. Their challenge was to develop tiny reconnaissance ro- do not have the luxury of abundant power and space, as do their
bots that soldiers could carry on their backs and scatter on the larger cousins, and they cannot house all the components neces-
floor like popcorn. On the home front, firefighters and search- sary to execute a given mission. Even carrying something as com-
and-rescue workers could toss these robots through windows pact as a video camera can nearly overwhelm a little robot. Con-
and let them scoot around to look for trapped victims or sniff sequently, their sensors, processing power and physical strength
Actual positions
Mirror image
This ambiguity is resolved by having one of the
robots take a left turn and measuring its new position,
Middle Layer which will differ depending on which mirror image is
contains two the correct arrangement.
microcontrollers
and a 4800-baud
radio modem
Bottom Layer
contains two motors,
gearheads,
odometers and
batteries
Wrong way
MAPPING STRATEGY
By using one another as reference points, millibots can find robots switch roles. The lead robots become the new beacons,
their way through an unknown space. In this example, three and the rearmost millibot begins moving around and taking data.
robots fix themselves in place and act as beacons. The fourth The maps thus collected can be stitched together into a larger
robot surveys the area using its sonar. When it is done, the composite map of the entire area.
RED MOVES GREEN MOVES BLUE MOVES YELLOW MOVES RED MOVES
BRYAN CHRISTIE DESIGN
Ledge
Millibot
Articulated joint
An assembled train Motorized joints lift As the topmost robots Once the lead robots Having scaled the
pushes up against the forwardmost reach over the lip of the have gained enough obstacle, the
the edge of the robots against the object, they bend traction, they pull up robots go their
obstacle. side of the obstacle. forward to gain traction. the bottom ones. separate ways.
make optimal use of the available room and power. In a typical al Positioning System (GPS) receivers, fixed beacons and visu-
mission, some millibots are charged with making maps of the al landmark recognition. Moreover, they have the processing
surroundings. Others provide live feedback for the human op- power to match current sensor information to existing maps.
erator or carry sensors specific to that mission. To get the job None of these techniques works reliably for midget robots.
done, the robots must collaborate. They have a limited sensor range; the millibot sonar can measure
distances out to about two meters. They are too small to carry
Where Are We? GPS units. Dead reckoning— the technique of tracking position
ONE VITAL TASK that requires collaboration is localization: by measuring the wheel speed—is frustrated by their low weight.
figuring out the team’s position. Larger robots have the luxury Something as seemingly inconsequential as the direction of the
of several techniques to ascertain their position, such as Glob- weave of a rug can dramatically influence their motion, making
odometry readings inaccurate, just as a car’s odometer would
fail to give accurate distances if driven on an ice-covered lake.
THE AUTHORS
of the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education in robot sending the signal and the robot receiving it. A cone-
Mexico. He is an avid amateur astronomer. The authors thank the shaped piece of metal on the sensing module reflects ultrasound
rest of the millibot team—Chris Paredis, Ben Brown, Curt Bererton down onto a transducer, allowing the robots to detect sound
and Mike Vande Weghe—for their invaluable contributions. from any direction. The process is analogous to measuring the
distance to an approaching storm by timing the interval between
Rise of
the Robots
by Hans Moravec
II n recent years the mushrooming power, functionality and ubiquity of computers and the Internet have
outstripped early forecasts about technology’s rate of advancement and usefulness in everyday life.
Alert pundits now foresee a world saturated with powerful computer chips, which will increasingly in-
sinuate themselves into our gadgets, dwellings, apparel and even our bodies.
Yet a closely related goal has remained stubbornly elusive. In stark contrast to the largely unanticipat-
ed explosion of computers into the mainstream, the entire endeavor of robotics has failed rather com-
pletely to live up to the predictions of the 1950s. In those days, experts who were dazzled by the seem-
ingly miraculous calculational ability of computers thought that if only the right software were written,
computers could become the artificial brains of so- 25 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXCLUSIVE ONLINE ISSUE
phisticated autonomous robots. Within a decade or two, they believed, such robots would be cleaning
our floors, mowing our lawns and, in general, eliminating drudgery from our lives.
Obviously, it hasn’t turned out that way. It is true that industrial robots have transformed the manu-
facture of automobiles, among other products. But that kind of automation is a far cry from the versatile,
mobile, autonomous creations that so many scientists and engineers have hoped for. In pursuit of such
robots, waves of researchers have grown disheartened and scores of start-up companies have gone out of
business.
It is not the mechanical “body” that is unattainable; articulated arms and other moving mechanisms
adequate for manual work already exist, as the industrial robots attest. Rather it is the computer-based
artificial brain that is still well below the level of sophistication needed to build a humanlike robot.
Nevertheless, I am convinced that the decades-old dream of a useful, general-purpose autonomous
robot will be realized in the not too distant future. By 2010 we will see mobile robots as big as people but
with cognitive abilities similar in many respects to those of a lizard. The machines will be capable of car-
rying out simple chores, such as vacuuming, dusting, delivering packages and taking out the garbage. By
2040, I believe, we will finally achieve the original goal of robotics and a thematic mainstay of science
fiction: a freely moving machine with the intellectual capabilities of a human being.
I n light of what I have just described as a history of largely unfulfilled goals in robotics, why do I believe
that rapid progress and stunning accomplishments are in the offing? My confidence is based on recent
developments in electronics and software, as well as on my own observations of robots, computers and
even insects, reptiles and other living things over the past 30 years.
The single best reason for optimism is the soaring performance in recent years of mass-produced com-
puters. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the computers readily available to robotics researchers were capa-
ble of executing about one million instructions per second (MIPS). Each of these instructions represented a
very basic task, like adding two 10-digit numbers or storing the result in a specified location in memory.
In the 1990s computer power suitable for controlling a research robot shot through 10 MIPS, 100
MIPS and has lately reached 1,000 in high-end desktop machines. Apple’s new iBook laptop computer,
with a retail price at the time of this writing of $1,600, achieves more than 500 MIPS. Thus, functions far
beyond the capabilities of robots in the 1970s and 1980s are now coming close to commercial viability.
28 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN EXCLUSIVE ONLINE ISSUE COPYRIGHT 2004 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC. MAY 2004
For example, in October 1995 an experimental vehicle called sophisticated artificial system—for example, an electronic
Navlab V crossed the U.S. from Washington, D.C., to San one—can be made and programmed to do the same thing as
Diego, driving itself more than 95 percent of the time. The vehi- the human nervous system, including the brain. This issue is
cle’s self-driving and navigational system was built around a 25- controversial in some circles right now, and there is room for
MIPS laptop based on a microprocessor by Sun Microsystems. brilliant people to disagree.
The Navlab V was built by the Robotics Institute at Carnegie At the crux of the matter is the question of whether biolog-
Mellon University, of which I am a member. Similar robotic ve- ical structure and behavior arise entirely from physical law
hicles, built by researchers elsewhere in the U.S. and in Ger- and whether, moreover, physical law is computable—that is
many, have logged thousands of highway kilometers under all to say, amenable to computer simulation. My view is that there
kinds of weather and driving conditions. is no good scientific evidence to negate either of these propo-
In other experiments within the past few years, mobile sitions. On the contrary, there are compelling indications that
robots mapped and navigated unfamiliar office suites, and both are true.
computer vision systems located textured objects and tracked Molecular biology and neuroscience are steadily uncovering
and analyzed faces in real time. Meanwhile personal comput- the physical mechanisms underlying life and mind but so far
ers became much more adept at recognizing text and speech. have addressed mainly the simpler mechanisms. Evidence that
Still, computers are no match today for humans in such simple functions can be composed to produce the higher capa-
functions as recognition and navigation. This puzzled experts bilities of nervous systems comes from programs that read,
for many years, because computers are far superior to us in recognize speech, guide robot arms to assemble tight compo-
calculation. The explanation of this apparent paradox fol- nents by feel, classify chemicals by artificial smell and taste,
lows from the fact that the human brain, in its entirety, is not reason about abstract matters and so on. Of course, comput-
a true programmable, general-purpose computer (what com- ers and robots today fall far short of broad human or even
puter scientists refer to as a universal machine; almost all animal competence. But that situation is understandable in
computers nowadays are examples of such machines). light of an analysis, summarized in the next section, that con-
To understand why this is requires an evolutionary perspec- cludes that today’s computers are only powerful enough to
tive. To survive, our early ancestors had to do several things re- function like insect nervous systems. And, in my experience,
peatedly and very well: locate food, escape predators, mate and robots do indeed perform like insects on simple tasks.
protect offspring. Those tasks depended strongly on the brain’s Ants, for instance, can follow scent trails but become disori-
ability to recognize and navigate. Honed by hundreds of mil- ented when the trail is interrupted. Moths follow pheromone
lions of years of evolution, the brain became a kind of ultraso- trails and also use the moon for guidance. Similarly, many com-
MAY 2004 phisti- mercial robots today follow guide wires installed beneath the
cated—but special-purpose—computer. surface they move over, and some orient themselves using lasers
The ability to do mathematical calculations, of course, was that read bar codes on walls.
irrelevant for survival. Nevertheless, as language transformed If my assumption that greater computer power will even-
human culture, at least a small part of our brains evolved into tually lead to human-level mental capabilities is true, we can
a universal machine of sorts. One of the hallmarks of such a expect robots to match and surpass the capacity of various
machine is its ability to follow an arbitrary set of instructions, animals and then finally humans as computer-processing
and with language, such instructions could be transmitted and rates rise sufficiently high. If on the other hand the assump-
carried out. But because we visualize numbers as complex tion is wrong, we will someday find specific animal or human
shapes, write them down and perform other such functions, skills that elude implementation in robots even after they have
we process digits in a monumentally awkward and inefficient enough computer power to match the whole brain. That
way. We use hundreds of billions of neurons to do in minutes would set the stage for a fascinating scientific challenge—to
what hundreds of them, specially “rewired” and arranged for somehow isolate and identify the fundamental ability that
calculation, could do in milliseconds. brains have and that computers lack. But there is no evidence
A tiny minority of people are born with the ability to do yet for such a missing principle.
seemingly amazing mental calculations. In absolute terms, it’s The second proposition, that physical law is amenable to
not so amazing: they calculate at a rate perhaps 100 times computer simulation, is increasingly beyond dispute. Scientists
that of the average person. Computers, by comparison, are and engineers have already produced countless useful simula-
millions or billions of times faster. tions, at various levels of abstraction and approximation, of
everything from automobile crashes to the “color” forces that
Can Hardware Simulate Wetware? hold quarks and gluons together to make up protons and neu-
trons.
streets, fields and homes that robotics could begin to overtake reply that it put them there because its owner likes candlelit
pure information technology commercially. dinners and it likes to please its owner. Further queries would
A second generation of universal robot with a mouselike elicit more details about a simple inner mental life concerned
100,000 MIPS will adapt as the first generation does not and only with concrete situations and people in its work area.
will even be trainable. Besides application programs, such Fourth-generation universal robots with a humanlike 100
robots would host a suite of software “conditioning mod- million MIPS will be able to abstract and generalize. They will
ules” that would generate positive and negative reinforcement result from melding powerful reasoning programs to third-
signals in predefined circumstances. For example, doing jobs generation machines. These reasoning programs will be the far
fast and keeping its batteries charged will be positive; hitting more sophisticated descendants of today’s theorem provers
or breaking something will be negative. There will be other and expert systems, which mimic human reasoning to make
ways to accomplish each stage of an application program, medical diagnoses, schedule routes, make financial decisions,
from the minutely specific (grasp the handle underhand or configure computer systems, analyze seismic data to locate oil
overhand) to the broadly general (work indoors or outdoors). deposits and so on.
As jobs are repeated, alternatives that result in positive rein- Properly educated, the resulting robots will become quite
forcement will be favored, those with negative outcomes formidable. In fact, I am sure they will outperform us in any
shunned. Slowly but surely, second-generation robots will conceivable area of endeavor, intellectual or physical. In-
work increasingly well. evitably, such a development will lead to a fundamental re-
A monkeylike five million MIPS will permit a third genera- structuring of our society. Entire corporations will exist with-
tion of robots to learn very quickly from mental rehearsals in out any human employees or investors at all. Humans will
simulations that model physical, cultural and psychological play a pivotal role in formulating the intricate complex of laws
factors. Physical properties include shape, weight, strength, tex- that will govern corporate behavior. Ultimately, though, it is
ture and appearance of things, and how to handle them. Cul- likely that our descendants will cease to work in the sense that
tural aspects include a thing’s name, value, proper location we do now. They will probably occupy their days with a vari-
and purpose. Psychological factors, applied to humans and ety of social, recreational and artistic pursuits, not unlike to-
robots alike, include goals, beliefs, feelings and preferences. day’s comfortable retirees or the wealthy leisure classes.
Developing the simulators will be a huge undertaking involv- The path I’ve outlined roughly recapitulates the evolution of
ing thousands of programmers and experience-gathering human intelligence—but 10 million times more rapidly. It sug-
robots. The simulation would track external events and tune gests that robot intelligence will surpass our own well before
its models to keep them faithful to reality. It would let a robot 2050. In that case, mass-produced, fully educated robot scien-
learn a skill by imitation and afford a kind of consciousness. tists working diligently, cheaply, rapidly and increasingly effec-
Asked why there are candles on the table, a third-generation tively will ensure that most of what science knows in 2050 will
robot might consult its simulation of house, owner and self to have been discovered by our artificial progeny!
HANS MORAVEC is a principal research scientist at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie VEHICLES: EXPERIMENTS IN SYNTHETIC PSYCHOLOGY. Valentino Brait-
enberg. MIT Press, 1984.
Mellon University. Over the past 40 years he has worked on eight mobile robots, the
AI: THE TUMULTUOUS HISTORY OF THE SEARCH FOR ARTIFICIAL IN-
first of which—an assemblage of tin cans, batteries, lights and a motor—he con- TELLIGENCE. Daniel Crevier. Basic Books, 1993.
structed at age 10. His current work focuses on enabling robots to determine their po- ROBOT: MERE MACHINE TO TRANSCENDENT MIND. Hans Moravec.
sition and to navigate by a three-dimensional awareness of their surroundings. Oxford University Press, 1999.
PERSONAL ROBOTS MAY SOON BE AS CHEAP AND CUSTOMIZABLE AS PERSONAL COMPUTERS BY W. WAYT GIBBS
“Could this be the place?” I wonder as months ago as he was repairing one of the A simple metal frame holds up to six
I stand before a nondescript storefront, generic “white box” PCs he assembles shelves at various positions. “All of the
formerly a tattoo parlor, in the tiny bor- from components and sells at his small electronics mount on these trays, which
ough of Youngwood, Pa. The windows computer store half a block up the street. slide out,” he explains. One tray holds the
are covered by blinds; the door bears for- What if robots could be built up from in- motherboard, which is a diminutive Mini-
bidding bars. The building lacks a sign or terchangeable, commodity parts just the ITX made by VIA that crams an Intel-
even a house number. It seems an odd lo- way that desktop computers are? Better compatible processor with 512 megabytes
cation from which to launch an ambi- yet, what if there were a robotic platform of memory, video, audio and networking
tious new species of robot. that could accept the thousands of plug- chips all onto a circuit board the size of a
But when Thomas J. Burick opens the and-play PC peripherals and accessories bread plate. Another tray contains two
door and I see three prototype “PC-Bots” already on the market? hefty but inexpensive 12-volt batteries
sitting on his small workbench, I realize Soon there will be. White Box Ro- that allow the robot to run for three hours
that this 34-year-old entrepreneur is no botics, Burick’s nascent company, is between charges. Standard laptop hard
ordinary inventor. The half-meter-high preparing three varieties of its mobile ro- drives, CD burners, DVD drives— virtu-
robots look like R2-D2 droids that have botic chassis for mass production this ally any PC gadget you can find at Comp-
been redesigned by Cadillac. Burick says summer. Sitting on the workbench, each USA— can be mounted securely to these
that he spent a year honing their appear- of the final prototypes for the three ro- trays inside the robot’s body.
ance, something almost unheard of in se- bots looks quite distinct. “These robots run Windows XP, so
rious robotics, where function usually “This one is customized for security,” they can do anything your PC will do,”
trumps form. Burick says, putting his hand on the 912 Burick points out. But they can also do
To Burick, form is function, and it is HMV. “It’s painted with the same paint things that no PC can— move, for exam-
very important that he get the design used on the Hummer H2,” he notes. Hel- ple. Below the metal frame is a drive as-
right the first time. This is his life’s dream, la driving lamps are mounted on its front, sembly: two motors connected to two
and it has consumed his life savings. “As and webcams peer out from its head and four-inch wheels and a spring-mounted
a kid, I watched Lost in Space on TV and belly. “It could patrol your house while hard plastic ball. “This Delrin ball keeps
thought it was so fantastic that Will you are away and e-mail or page you if the robot stable even on uneven surfaces
Robinson had this machine who protect- it detects a loud noise or an unfamiliar and allows it to track its position pre-
ed him and was the best friend anyone person.” cisely even as it turns and spins,” he
could have,” he says, with boyish earnest- “And we call this one the 912 MP3,” notes. “And this whole drive assembly
ness. In seventh grade Burick built a Burick says, gesturing toward a white ro- comes off with four bolts, so if you want
voice-controlled mobile robot, and in bot of the same size and shape but sport- to replace it— with tank-style treads, for
high school he constructed an autono- ing a color LCD screen in its back, a example— it’s a five-minute job.” Even-
mous fire-fighting rover. stereo control panel in its midriff and a tually he hopes to offer an optional drive
As he got older, Burick dabbled with striking blue lamp in its head instead of a mechanism capable of climbing stairs.
the low-level microcontrollers, servos camera. “We designed this to appeal to With an oomph, Burick lifts the 40-
and sensors used these days by amateur young people, who could use it as their pound machine down to the floor and
robot builders, but he finally gave up in bedroom computer. It can download turns it on. To my surprise, the 18-inch-
frustration. His jobs had been in retail, music and play DVDs in response to tall rover is quieter than my laptop com-
selling consumer electronics rather than voice commands.” puter. Just like any PC, it has ports on its
making them. With no formal training in But at the moment it is the third ro- backside for a monitor, keyboard, mouse,
programming or electrical engineering, bot, the basic model, that illustrates Ethernet cable and so on. But untether-
“the learning curve was too steep,” he Burick’s idea best. Its exterior shell has ing the machine is only a matter of plug-
says. “I thought there has got to be a bet- been removed to reveal an inner skeleton, ging an inexpensive WiFi receiver into
ter way.” common to all three siblings, that allows the motherboard. Burick uses his laptop
The better way occurred to him 18 them to work like PCs on wheels. to log in over the wireless link. “Okay,
HAVE THEY FINALLY COME OUT WITH A ROBOT FOR THE REST OF US? BY GEORGE MUSSER
For generations, tinkerers have been piece, and Hero I is still the state of the art. ple. Others, such as robotic lawnmowers
pointing out how much their projects will Anyone who builds a robot appreci- and pool cleaners, aim to do a single task
lighten the load of housework. For gen- ates what happened. When humans use a in a highly controlled environment. The
erations, spouses and parents have failed personal computer, we enter into the com- next step up is to do a single task in a
to be impressed by these claims. When I puter’s world. If it can’t do something, or highly uncontrolled environment, and the
built my first robot seven years ago, peo- if it crashes, too bad; we have to deal. But most obvious candidate for that is vacu-
ple kept asking, “So what does it do?” I a robot enters into our world. If floors are uming. Over the past several years, a
explained that it would eventually vacu- uneven, if legs get in the way, if lighting number of companies have promised to
um the floor. I should have just been hon- conditions change, the robot has to deal. roll out floor-cleaning robots. A few of
est: “Not much, but it sure is cool, isn’t Extra computing power doesn’t neces- them have even delivered.
it?” All these years later I still have trou- sarily help; on the contrary, more sophis- Apart from DustBot, a cheap but
ble getting my creations to do the most tication typically means less resilience. clever toy made by the Japanese compa-
basic things, like move in a straight line. Through the school of hard knocks ny Tomy, the first consumer robot that
My professions of usefulness don’t carry (lots of them), robot experimenters have could vacuum was Cye. Released in 1999
much weight around the house anymore. learned to keep things simple. Massachu- by Pittsburgh-based Probotics, Cye is the
At least I am not alone. Seldom in the setts Institute of Technology professor Apple II of robots: just pull it out of the
history of technology has an industry and robo-guru Rodney A. Brooks led the box and plug it in. I tested one back in the
been so eagerly anticipated, and so slow to way in the mid-1980s with a new style of fall of 2000. It’s about the size of a toast-
emerge, as the consumer robot industry. robot programming, in which cheap sen- er oven, with two wheels, a pair of wheel
Back in the early 1980s, when computers sors directly trigger elementary behaviors. odometers to measure its movement, and
were turning from hobbyist playthings Most robot kits these days, such as Lego a bump switch to sense when it hits some-
into mass-market appliances, it looked Mindstorms, embrace this approach. And thing. To prove its usefulness, it can tow
as though robots would soon follow. a similar design philosophy is reviving the a small upright vacuum cleaner.
Heathkit’s famous Hero I robot kit came fortunes of the home robot industry. You control Cye from a PC via a wire-
out in 1982, not long after the original Some products, admittedly, achieve less link, and the desktop software is
IBM PC. Entrepreneur magazine pre- simplicity by giving up the pretense of do- where Cye really shines. As the bot blun-
dicted a $2-billion home robot market by ing anything useful at all. Robot dogs ders around, it relays back odometry read-
1990. Today the original PC is a museum such as Sony’s Aibo are the classic exam- ings, and the software estimates its posi-
THE TECHNOLOGY OF TELEPRESENCE MAKES THE WORLD EVEN SMALLER BY MARK ALPERT
A week after the World Trade Center knows how frustrating the experience on six wheels and has a pair of “flip-
disaster, I drove from New York City can be. Unless the participants are sit- pers” that it can extend forward for
to Somerville, Mass., to visit the of- ting right in front of the camera, it’s climbing stairs. The antenna is fixed to
fices of iRobot, one of the country’s often difficult to understand what the back of the machine like a short
leading robotics companies. I’d origi- they’re saying. Researchers are devel- black tail.
nally planned to fly there, but with the oping new systems that may make After I finished admiring Cobalt 2,
horrific terrorist attacks of September videoconferences more realistic [see I turned to a nearby computer moni-
11 fresh in my mind, I decided it “Virtually There,” by Jaron Lanier; tor that showed the robot’s Web page.
would be prudent to rent a car. As I Scientific American, April 2001]. In the center of the screen was the
drove down the Massachusetts Turn- But there’s another problem with video that the robot was transmitting
pike, gazing at the American flags that videoconferencing: the equipment isn’t over the Internet. The machine was
hung from nearly every overpass, it very mobile. In contrast, a telepresence still staring at me, so I had a nice view
seemed quite clear that traveling robot can travel nearly anywhere and of my own backside. The video was
across the U.S., whether for business train its camera on whatever the user grainy and jerky; because the system
or for pleasure, would be more ardu- wishes to see. The robot would allow transmits data at about 300 kilobits
ous and anxiety-provoking from now you to observe the activity in a compa- per second, the user sees only five or
on. Coincidentally, this issue was re- ny’s warehouse, for example, or to in- six frames per second (television-qual-
lated to the purpose of my trip: spect deliveries on the loading dock. ity video shows 30 frames per sec-
I was evaluating a new kind of The idea for iRobot’s machines ond). “You’re trading off the frame-
robot that could allow a travel-weary originated at the Massachusetts Insti- update rate for the ability to move
executive to visit any office in the tute of Technology’s Artificial Intelli- and control the camera,” Angle ex-
world without ever leaving his or her gence Laboratory. Rodney Brooks, the plains. Transmitting audio over the
own desk. lab’s director, co-founded the compa- Internet is more troublesome because
The technology is called telepres- ny in 1990 with M.I.T. graduates Col- of time lags, but users can easily get
ence, and it takes advantage of the in Angle and Helen Greiner. iRobot’s around this problem by equipping the
vast information-carrying capacity of offices are on the second floor of a robot with a cellular phone.
the Internet. A telepresence robot is nondescript strip mall, just above a Now I was ready to give Cobalt 2
typically equipped with a video cam- store selling children’s clothing. It’s the a road test. Using the mouse, I clicked
era, a microphone, and a wireless kind of office that an eight-year-old on the area of the video screen where I
transmitter that enables it to send sig- would adore— machines that look like wanted the robot to go. The ma-
nals to an Internet connection. If a miniature tanks lurk in every corner, chine’s motors whirred loudly as they
user at a remote location logs on to as if awaiting orders to attack. The ro- turned the wheels, first pointing the
the right Web page, he or she can see bots are tested in a large, high- robot in the right direction and then
what the robot sees and hear what the ceilinged room called the High Bay, driving it to the indicated spot. Then I
robot hears. What’s more, the user which is where I encountered a telep- devised a tougher challenge: I directed
can move the machine from place to resence robot named Cobalt 2. the machine to smash into the wall on
place simply by clicking on the mouse. The machine resembles a futuristic the other side of the room. Fortunate-
With the help of artificial-intelligence wheeled animal with a long neck and a ly for Cobalt 2, its compact torso is
software and various sensors, tele- bubblelike head. When the robot studded with sensors. The machine’s
presence robots can roam down hall- raised its head to train its camera on acoustic sensor acts like a ship’s
ways without bumping into walls and me, it looked kind of cute, like a baby sonar, detecting obstacles by sending
even climb flights of stairs. giraffe. Angle, who is iRobot’s chief out sound waves and listening to the
Until now, businesspeople have re- executive, says the company designed echoes. Infrared sensors gauge the dis-
lied on techniques such as videocon- the machine to appear friendly and un- tance to the obstacles and can also
ferencing to participate in meetings threatening. “We wanted to create a warn the robot if it’s heading toward
that they can’t attend. Anyone who’s device that would be easy for people to a drop-off. Cobalt 2 stopped just shy
seen a videoconference, though, interact with,” he says. The robot rides of the wall, thwarting my destructive
A wonderful childlike excitement filled (pronounced EYE-bo) means “pal” or breed. Sony unveiled the first-genera-
the halls of Scientific American on the “companion” in Japanese and is also a tion Aibo ERS-110 in 1999, producing
day that the Aibo ERS-210 arrived in rough acronym for Artificial Intelli- a limited run of 5,000 robotic hounds
the mail. Clutching the box tightly, I gence Robot. For weeks I’d been beg- priced at a howling $2,500 each. They
rushed to the office of my colleague ging Sony officials to let me evaluate the sold out almost instantly, prompting
George Musser and shouted, “It’s here! computerized canine. Sony to rush 10,000 similar units to
It’s here!” George beamed like a kid on In the past few years, toy companies market. The improved second-genera-
Christmas morning and immediately have introduced an entire litter of elec- tion ERS-210, a relative bargain at
tore the box open. Inside was a foot- tronic pets: Poo-Chi the Interactive $1,500, has also won the hearts of well-
long, three-pound machine that looked Puppy (from Tiger Electronics), Tekno heeled customers since it went on sale
like a Jack Russell terrier wearing gray the Robotic Puppy (Manley Toy Quest) last November.
plastic armor. Sony Electronics had and Rocket the Wonder Dog (Fisher- What can explain such intense de-
bred the robotic dog in its research lab- Price), to name just a few. But Aibo is votion? Certainly part of Aibo’s appeal
oratories in Japan; the name “Aibo” the most advanced pooch of the new is its sophisticated technology. Each