Hans Moravec biography
Hans Moravec is chief scientist of
Seegrid Corporation, maker of vision-guided industrial mobile
robots. He had been research professor in the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, where he
retains an adjunct faculty position. He has been thinking about
machines thinking since he was a child in the 1950s, building his
first robot, a construct of tin cans, batteries, lights and a motor,
at age ten. In high school he won two science fair prizes for a
light-following electronic turtle and a tape-controlled robot hand.
As an undergraduate he designed a computer to control fancier robots,
and experimented with learning and automatic programming on commercial
machines. During his master's work he built a small robot with
whiskers and photoelectric eyes controlled by a minicomputer, and
wrote a thesis on a computer language for artificial intelligence. He
received a PhD from Stanford
University in 1980 for a TV-equipped robot, remote controlled by a
large computer, that negotiated cluttered obstacle courses, taking
about five hours. Since 1980 his Mobile Robot
Lab at CMU has discovered more effective approaches for robot
spatial representation, notably 3D occupancy
grids, that, with newly available computer power, promise
commercial free-ranging mobile robots within a decade. In 2003 he
co-founded SEEGRID Corporation to
undertake this commercialization. His books, Mind Children: the future of robot and
human intelligence, 1988, and Robot:
mere machine to transcendent mind, 1998, consider the implications
of evolving robot intelligence. He has also published papers and
articles in robotics, computer graphics, multiprocessors, space travel
and other speculative areas.
long curriculum vita
ROBUG:
switch-programmable to wake/seek/avoid on light/touch/wind;
feelers charged to 90 volts!