Robots' Agility, Skills, Speed Rising Fast
Singularity Hub's "best robots of the year" report for 2009 shows industrial robots are faster than ever. AI is still several years away, however.
Hailing 2009 as "an amazing year in the world of robots," the site Singularity Hub has posted its second annual roundup of the year's best robots. Its summary says robots "continued their advance towards world domination with several impressive breakouts in areas such as walking, automation, and agility, while still lacking in adaptability and reasoning ability," adding that it "will be several years until robots can gain the artificial intelligence that will truly make them remarkable, but in the meantime they are still pretty awesome."
YouTube videos throughout the roundup show fast industrial robots, a pair of robots that cook a meal to order at a restaurant in Japan, a mobile robot that locates and plugs itself into nine electrical outlets in an office, and humanoid robots that walk, run, and navigate around obstacles.
The site's editors keep track of developments in robotics, nanotechnology, genetics, biology, artificial intelligence, aging, and other fields in progress toward "singularity," which they define as "the point in mankind's future when we will transcend current intellectual and biological limitations and initiate an intelligence and information explosion beyond imagining."