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Past Shows
June 11, 2005
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Bring on the Robot Monkey Butler: The present and future of robotic research
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or Ogg files for the first half of our documentary.
Listen to or download the mp3
or Ogg files for the second half of our documentary.
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The Terminator, C3PO and R2D2, Robbie the robot, Rosie the maid, and Commander Data are just a few of the many robots the entertainment industry has brought us. Sadly the technology industry has been less forthcoming. We rarely see real robots in real life, and as a result, many of us are still waiting impatiently for our robot servants. However, a robotics revolution may soon be upon us. Powerful computers and new ideas about robot design are bringing the possibility of useful, helpful robots much closer than they've ever been before. In this Quirks & Quarks special program, we'll speak to a bevy of roboticists about their work and about how close we are to a future where robots are a big part of our daily lives.
Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us, by Dr. Rodney Brooks
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Our guests include:
Dr. Rod Brooks, Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, who is an innovator in behaviour-based robotics, a design philosophy that's produced some fascinating advances in robot technology.
Dr. Elizabeth Croft, is a professor in the department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. She studies robot-human interaction, and discusses issues like how to make robots safe to be around, and how to give them muscles that work like human muscles do.
Mark Tilden is a robotics physicist, known for his innovative robot designs and his ability to create a functioning robot out of junk and spare parts. Recently he's been preoccupied with the development of a remarkable robot toy called Robosapien.
Robosapien, by Wowwee toys
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Dr. Ronald Arkin, the Director of the Mobile Robots Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has worked on developing models of robot behaviour based on animals like amphibians, insects and even dogs, and integrating these into real robots. Some of this has led him to work on development of AIBO, Sony's robot dog project. He's also done work on the potential social and ethical impacts of robots becoming a bigger part of our culture.
Robot Soccer player - Copyright, The RoboCup Federation |
Dr. Maja Mataric, the director of the University of Southern California Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, is interested in robotics for what it can teach us about human psychology. She's also firmly of the opinion that robots can and will be essential in the future as personal and medical assistants for an aging and infirm population in many wealthy countries.
Dr. Alan Mackworth, the Director of the Laboratory for Computational Intelligence at the University of British Columbia, took the idea of giving robots a goal quite literally. He was one of the inventors of robot soccer, which proved to be a fertile research project for developing capable robots that can operate in a dynamic environment. Today the RoboCup is a huge event, drawing hundreds of teams from around the world, and stimulating important advances in robot technology.
Dr. Andy Ruina is a professor of Mechanics at Cornell University. He and his colleagues have demonstrated a walking robot that, despite its simplicity and small brain, walks in a remarkably humanlike manner.
Dr. Ruina's Walking robot
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Dr. Deb Roy is an associate professor of Media Arts and Sciences in the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He's been working on finding ways to give robots language, using the innovative strategy of having them watch infants learn language. The idea is that the robots can take advantage of the ways that parents teach children about the connections that parents make between objects and words.
Dr. Roy and Ripley
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Dr. Gregory Dudek, director of the Centre for Intelligent Machines at McGill University, has been impressed by the progress in robotics recently. He's convinced that in his lifetime we'll see robots that match or exceed human abilities. Until that happens we'll see simpler robots becoming a bigger and bigger part of our daily lives.
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