2.12.2005
Haptics: Shaking Hands with a Robot
Haptics: Shaking Hands with a Robot
From the article:
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From the article:
- Small wonder that other thinkers are taking time out to ponder what all this means. They run the gamut from Ray Kurzweil (whose book The Age of Spiritual Machines draws an optimistic picture of humans embracing a cyborg destiny) to Marshall Brain (whose Robotic Nation site warns that full human membership in a world of robots means that at least half of us will get the idle time we have been hoping for—only we'll get it in the unemployment line).
I recommend the Robotic Nation essay site to those who haven't already looked it over, not because I agree with all he says, but because if ever I saw a site that will make almost anyone want to argue, this is it. But whether you end up grousing about Brain's vision of the future that includes unemployment rates of 50 percent, his proposed social engineering, or his view of the technology, you'll have to agree that he has an important point: Investing some thought up front in how robots will change our society might be a good plan.
According to Marshall Brain, android development pretty well hinges on developing adequate processing power and identifying vision algorithms for interpreting what is artificially "seen." I'm not convinced that they are the only issues holding us back. The world of robotics is dealing with plenty of other challenges. Among them is the need for bots to lift something as heavy as, say, a bowl of cereal, manipulate it the way that humans can (pouring in the milk, taking it to the table), and neither squeeze it till it breaks nor drop it so it shatters. We have a ways to go yet in that direction. And that, of course, brings us to robot haptics—and what they can do right now that is helping to propel us into our brave new robotic world.
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