Utility and Universal Robots, Soon
Hans Moravec

Abstract:
	Freely-roaming robots to fetch, clean and do other work have
been an elusive fantasy for decades.  Finally, in the 1990s, robots
that understand their surroundings are beginning to prowl ordinary
hallways and offices of research buildings, guided by programs using
ever smaller, cheaper and more powerful computers and sensors.  It
will soon be possible to produce mobile robots that can do useful work
in unfamiliar industrial settings.  Subsequently, smaller, cheaper and
better machines will begin to work in our homes.  The author proposes
a research and business plan that, in about two years, would result in
a "navigation head" able to guide factory vehicles in unfamiliar
territory using a three-dimensional sense of the surroundings.  By
2005, improvements might permit the first mass-market home utility
robots, from specialized machines like fully automatic vacuum
cleaners, to more capable ones able to manipulate objects as well as
travel.  Shortly after 2010, these machines should evolve into
"universal" robots that can be programmed for many tasks.  The talk
speculates on the subsequent capabilities of universal robots,
paralleling evolution of biological vertebrate intelligence, from
reptile-like in 2010, to mammal-like in 2020 to primate-like in 2030
to human-like around 2040.

Biography:
	Hans Moravec is a Principal Research Scientist in the Robotics
Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. 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.  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.

a full cv is available at:
    http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/users/hpm/hpm.cv.html