by Jessie Roberts
When Michael Belfiore visited the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) in December, he was “by turns delighted, amused, and spooked” by advances in general purpose robotics. He suggests that although smart appliances “are often seen as expensive novelties reserved for those who can afford them, they might well come to be viewed as necessities for a growing [and rapidly aging] population”:
The DRC programme manager Gill Pratt looks at those trends and sees robots – robots helping people in their homes just as dishwashers and vacuum cleaners do now. Nor does Pratt want to limit DRC-style bots, whose prototypes are relatively expensive, to big, high-profile disasters such as Fukushima. He foresees a day when large production runs will make them affordable enough for fire departments around the world. In that scenario, they would be just another tool available to first responders along with fire trucks and defibrillators. …
If DARPA’s deputy director Steven Walker is right, we can expect the robots competing in the future DRC Finals to demonstrate the ability to smoothly and efficiently perform such tasks as walking from place to place, using power tools, and perhaps even driving cars with their own processors doing most of the work of interpreting human commands. From there – if the road taken by driverless cars is any indication – humanoid robots will be just a few years of development (by companies such as Google) away from much greater autonomy.
The Dish 