ROBOTS GALORE:
From the bomb squad to the seven dwarfs
Glasgow would rather "pick winners" in new industries
than trust the free markets that destroyed its old ones.
ROBOTS GALORE:
From the bomb squad to the seven dwarfs
Glasgow would rather "pick winners" in new industries
than trust the free markets that destroyed its old ones.
A mix of the practical and the fanciful, Robotix '97 was a true crowd-pleaser. On the final day of the conference, when the doors were thrown open to the general public, lines immediately formed around the block, full of patient Glaswegians standing in the pouring rain. They came to marvel at prosthetic arms and human-sized "Robocop" automatons. Mobile robots mixed with the spectators on occasion, poking their robot snouts and video-camera lenses into everyone's business -- which raised the ominous question of just who was watching whom. To those looking for products in the here and now, a line from Britain-based Rehab Robots demonstrated real market potential. Similar, in general design, to the apparatus a dentist or ophthalmologist might use to examine teeth or eyes, these robots are currently in use as home care adjuncts, allowing bed- or chair-bound patients afflicted with such diseases as Alzheimer's or multiple sclerosis to feed themselves without human help. A spokesman for the company said that some 600 of the robots, at $1,000 a pop, had already been sold. Robotix '97 flourished the serious, like bomb-defusing robots in use by the British Army, and flaunted the silly -- Reading University professor Kevin Warwick's amusing Seven Dwarfs, a mob of little robots that followed each other around in circles. "Intelligent machinery" was the theme of the day. But as I wandered the exhibit, the thing that struck me most was just how mind-bendingly complex a machine needs to be to be able to duplicate such seemingly simple human physical processes as walking or gripping an object. Which, of course, begs the question of how much more infinitely difficult it will be to nail down the functions of the human mind in an artificial context. We've still got a ways to go.
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