Robotic Nation Evidence

Star Wars, ricercatori italiani creano un "vero" droide R2-D2

This article shows us two things:

• It shows how far translation software needs to advance before it will be truly useful.
  
  
• It talks about an "R2-D2 like" robot in Italy.

The original article is in Italian. When you run the original article through the Goggle "Italian to English" converter you get stuff like this:

Insomma, a barattolone that it walks like the model - with a movement to two or three legs, just like in films of Lucas. And that, second the investigators of Pisa, can be programmed for I use in the museums, or the hospitals. Or even, in future perspective, the houses. Of the rest it is not before the time that in order to create robot-servants is inspired to us, in order to render their aspect more familiar, to succeeding film of: as an example it has been recently introduced a Swiss prototype that, in the advanced part, remembers much Johnny 5, the machine Short Circuit. Therefore like the Japanese, to the vanguard in this field, often they are rifared their tradition of robot-cartoon.

And this:

But we see to describe po' better a this "Italian godson" of the mythical R2-d2. "our scope - Columbus still says - was to understand that it succeeds if to a computer come dates of the ' legs ', that is of the wheels, in order to walk. And therefore we have created this discreetly simple object from the mechanical point of view, that it has in himself a net wireless, an interface blue tooth, and logons standard to a PC to tramire normal taken usb ". And not enough: for being able to interact in the space, the robot has sensors to infrared and ultrasounds in order to understand the atmosphere in which it is found; it has a television camera that allows to analyze it the vision, and to recognize shapes, objects and faces (as an example has been programmed in order to recognize the swords laser of Star Wars ); and it has two microphones for vocal commandos, in order to emit sounds (between the which those, funny and most particular, typical about R2-d2) and in order to localize the position of who it speaks.

The translation is nearly impenetrable, but does indicate that this sounds a lot like a PC-bot.