As mentioned in our last blog post, the Robot Hall of Fame has found a new home at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, PA. On behalf of the Robot Hall of Fame, we proudly announce this year’s inductees.

• NASA Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity
• iRobot Roomba (WOOT!!!! You go, Meticulor!)
• DaVinci Medical Robot System
• Huey, Dewey, and Louie, from the 1971 film “Silent Running”
• T-800 Terminator, from the 1984 film “The Terminator”

source

Congratulations Class of 2010! Read on for more information about the Robot Hall of Fame!

As you can see from this year’s inductees, both real and fictional robots have been inducted into the hall of fame since its inception in 2003.

“Robots from Science – These are real robots that have served useful or potentially useful functions and demonstrated unique skills in accomplishing the purpose for which they were created. These may also be robots created primarily to entertain, as long as they function autonomously.

Robots from Science Fiction – These are fictional robots that have inspired us to create real robots that are productive, helpful, and entertaining. These robots have achieved worldwide fame as fictional characters and have helped form our opinions about the functions and values of real robots.” source

The creation of the Robot Hall of Fame was announced on the 30th of April, 2003, at the Opening Gala Celebration  for the RoboCup First American Open. (You may remember our recent post about the Robocup. The American Open is a local Robocup event, whereas the one we blogged about was the international competition; both are part of the same family of events).

If you can, I encourage you to visit the Robot Hall of Fame. You can view up-close many of the robots who have been honored with induction there, including many of our favorite television/movie robots of the past and present. Bask in the robotic glow of  star-bots such as:

• Maria
• Gort
• Robby
• B-9
• HAL 9000
• Dewey
• and last but certainly not least, C-3PO & R2-D2

Finally, you can take a look at this video to get a peek at the Robot Hall of Fame… as if you needed more of a reason to go!

Thought the iRobot Roombas were only good for collecting dust bunnies? Think again! At MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intellgence Laboratory (CSAIL for short), Roombas have been reimagined so that they now can collect fruit! These are no ordinary Roombas, though. As you can see above, they have been severely tinkered with to produce the above gardening robot.  At this amazing garden, a protype for a larger and more comprehensively autonomous greenhouse, the robots can water and polinate plants, locate and gather the fruit, and most amazing of all, respond to requests from the plants. Yes, I didn’t mistype: the plants can actually communicate to the robots!

“Networked sensors help the plants ‘request’ water or nutrients from their robotic gardeners… giving each plant the ability to monitor and broadcast its own physical state allows the robots to distribute resources and care on demand.” source

We may be looking at the garden of the future! But we’d better not tell any of this to Meticulor. He might get jealous.

NRDD - Nasal Relief Delivery Droid

That’s NRDD. He’s our Nasal Relief Delivery Droid. He supplies the tissues when one of us gets sick, or both of us watch a sad movie. No matter the drippy-nose related disaster, we can always count on NRDD.

NRDD isn’t a real robot, to be sure – he just looks like one – but we do have a pair of real life robots that live with us. As with many robots, these robots are both our friends and our partners. We consider our relationship with them a symbiotic one. We provide clean energy, maintenance and lots of love and they – these two at least – clean the floors.

Addencientia & Meticulor

Meet Addencientia and Meticulor. 

Addencientia (on the left), “Addy“, for short, is an iRobot Scooba floor washing robot. She uses a water and soap solution to clean our wood floors.

Meticulor (on the right), “Metti“, for short, is an iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaning robot. He sweeps up our wooden floors and vacuums the carpet of the rooms that have it.

Together they make a great team and we really appreciate all of their hard work. I am sure they appreciate ours as well, as we take great care of them.

What makes them robots, though? Why are they not just a weirdly shaped mop and a cordless vacuum?

Addy and Metti are machines that perform work. They do so with little or no intervention from people. As long as we keep them clean and well maintained, they will continue to keep our house clean and well maintained for us.

Meticulor has a schedule that he uses to determine when he is going to start cleaning up. Let me tell you, if you are bare-foot when Metti starts you’d better head for the hills or find yourself some slippers, because he is a bot on a mission and he doesn’t let measly toes get in the way. 

See what I mean?

Addy likes to be told when to clean, but once she is told, she goes off on her own. We don’t tell either of them where to clean or how to clean it or even how long to clean. They have adaptive programs, both of them, to determine the best route, the best amount of time and the best attention to detail to keep our house looking great.

Addy and Metti are the perfect example, I think, of people and robots co-existing happily. If we treated them any differently than we do – if we treated them any differently than any other member of the family – surely they would fall into disrepair and do a poor job. If we love them, treat them well and respect them, they will so the same for us.

It is possible that one day robots will be able to think like we do. When that day comes, I’d like to introduce one of them to our good friends Addy and Metti. I am sure they’d get along.