When Will You Own a C-3PO?

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This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the artificial intelligence field. Are you miffed because you still don’t have your robotic butler? You might be surprised at the many ways in which AI and robotics have already penetrated our lives.

It’s worth noting that robotics and AI are not exactly the same thing, though the two fields do feed each other. If we think of robotics as the hardware, then AI is the software. This can best be shown with a couple of examples. Think of an industrial robot, a one-armed machine that does the same thing day in, day out, as long as it’s turned on and something doesn’t go wrong with it mechanically. There is no question that this is a robot, but its functions are very limited, and it is designed to function in a very specifically constrained environment.

Now think about Google, or any other search engine. You type keywords into the text box and it sifts through its massive database to find the web sites that contain the most relevant content. It wouldn’t be able to find anything at all without some kind of application of AI.

So what kind of progress have we made and what can we look forward to in the future? With two conferences covering artificial intelligence sharing space this year (and plenty of robots showing off in the contests and other areas of the conference), it seems like a good time to consider what is available to the consumer and what is on the horizon. Incidentally, if you’re curious about the conferences, they were held in Boston, and they’re the 2006 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/aaai06.php) and the 2006 Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/IAAI/iaai06.php).

So we all know about Sony’s Aibo and iRobot’s Roomba. Many of you probably heard that a heavily modified autonomous Hummer named Stanley won the DARPA Challenge last year by negotiating more than 130 miles of desert terrain without human intervention. What’s next?

Next: Ordinary Assistance >>
 

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