Oct 9, 2004 4 min read

PITTSBURGH (AP) – The researchers who developed robotics systems that play soccer, explored Antarctica and gave football fans a 360-degree view of Super Bowl XXXV are pausing to celebrate their 25th anniversary – and contemplate where robotics will take the world in the next 25 years. The four-day celebration at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute begins Monday with the second annual inductions into the school’s Robot Hall of Fame. C-3PO, the droll droid of “Star Wars” fame, and Robby the Robot from the 1956 cult flick “Forbidden Planet” are among the honorees.

So where do two Tinseltown tin men fit into a symposium of 40 experts chewing on subjects like molecular electronics, carbon nanotubes and whether artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence in the next 50 years?

“There is a little bit, always, of science fiction in all things – but that’s OK,” said professor emeritus Angel Jordan, who helped found the Robotics Institute in 1979. “Science fiction preceded the reality of the researchers. It gives you an impetus … science fiction becomes reality.”

How fast that will continue to occur is open to debate.

The anniversary’s theme is “Robots and Thought” – and the founders’ expectations about advances in artificial intelligence are tame compared to those of some experts who will address the grand challenges facing robotics in a series of lectures on Wednesday.

Ray Kurzweil, an artificial intelligence expert and author, has said accelerating technology will lead to superhuman machine intelligence, probably by the year 2030 – a year after the institute’s 50th anniversary.

Professor Raj Reddy, a co-founder of the institute along with former Westinghouse Electric Corp. executive Tom Murrin, isn’t so sure. Reddy said he gives the possibility “less than 5 percent likelihood that it will happen.”

“Four hundred years ago, people wanted to fly and they created all sorts of contraptions and, eventually, it happened,” Reddy said. “Science fiction is the same thing … a human desire to build systems and kind of give them accentuations of the kind of capabilities we want them to have. But it may take us 1,000 years to get to C-3PO.”

The goals of the institute were more modest and are, largely, on schedule, Reddy said.

“We didn’t have these kind of science fiction aspirations. We wanted autonomous, mobile systems and we have demonstrated those,” Reddy said.

The institute started with robotic arms and devices meant for industrial uses. By 1982, it had created a robot to work underwater at a nuclear plant in Alabama.

The 1980s saw the development of more autonomous vehicles, and the 1990s saw robots designed to interact with humans: Project LISTEN, an automated reading tutor; and Grace, a social robot that was able to ask questions, get in line, register for a conference and then find its way to a spot where “she” gave a 20-minute speech.

It has created robots that play soccer – the autonomous machines were programmed to seek the ball, block opponents, pass to an open teammate and ultimately, to score – and one that was sent to Antarctica to inspect rocks in the ice and look for meteorites.

The EyeVision system developed for Superbowl XXXV in 2001 used robotic technology to coordinate the movements of more than 30 video cameras high above the field of Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla. The technology let viewers “float” 360-degrees above and around instant-replayed action.

The next great frontier for robotics, Reddy says, is a conundrum: teaching computers to learn.

“The biggest barrier is (developing) computers that learn with experience and exhibit goal-directed behavior. If you can’t build a system that can learn with experience, you might as well forget everything else,” Reddy said.

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On the Net:

http://www.ri.cmu.edu

http://www.ri25.org

http://www.robothalloffame.org

http://www.kurzweilai.net