- Posted by sondreb on August 23, 2008
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This week the CTO of Intel Corporation delivered a keynote at the Intel Developer Forum, where he laid out some of his predictions of the future and some interesting details on research that Intel is working on.
http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20080821comp.htm
I have always had a deep interest in computing and especially robotics. The rapid progress we're experiencing today is affecting the life's of everyone and soon it'll be more drastic effect than ever before.
"There is speculation that we may be approaching an inflection point where the rate of technology advancements is accelerating at an exponential rate, and machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason, in the not so distant future."
RoboCup has a mission to beat humans in soccer by 2050, my estimate is that it will happen long before that. I'm sure many of you have already seen the Boston BigDog robot that spread through the Internet a while back like a burning forest in summer time. If you haven't seen it, make sure you visit the link above.
MIT is doing a lot of interesting robotics work, especially with their uBot-5 platform, which I think is the foundation of the M.D.S (Mobile Dexterous Social) robot named Nexi. While this video is scripted and the voice is pre-recorded, it does demonstrate how far we've come with humanoid robots.
Many of you have probably seen the movie I, Robot with Will Smith. While it's a great sci-fi movie and it does show possible things of the future, I'd imagine a world with a more diverse collection of robots. Anything from cats, dogs, birds, cars and trucks, humanoids and forms we're not even considering today. But that movie is based around Asimov's Laws of Robotics, but only the 3 first laws ... I'm sure you haven't read them all before, but you'll have a laugh: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/asimov-laws-robotics.php
5. A robot may not obey orders given to it by any human being who is my worthless ex-wife, Brandi Asimov, because such orders would conflict with the Fourth Law.
Robots will come in many form factors, take a look at this snake robot which even I think is kind of creepy.
To end of this post I want to share with you a longer and deeper video on the state of humanoid servo-based robots and some philosophical thoughts by master robot builder, David Calkins.
One final note, if you'd interested in getting involved with robotics, Microsoft have the perfect tool for you which gets you started faster and easier than ever before. It's called Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio and it's free for hobbyist and a small price for commercial use. Check it out at http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics/
While you're playing with RDS, you can use the RoboChamps arena to demonstrate your programming skills! http://www.robochamps.com/