Robots

There was some objection to my post Is Robo Habilis a gateway to Intelligence? to the effect that it might take a lot of extra time to build the robots, and that would lengthen the time necessary to develop AI. That might certainly be true of the garage experimenter, but in the world at large, the robots are already here. The kind of robots I’m thinking of are bolted-to-the-table torsobots in the tradition of Cog:

The reason is that as of even date, you just can’t put enough processing in a mobile robot to be doing the kind of processing a human is doing with its sensory and motor streams.

There’s also of course Kismet:

and various other research robots ranging from the simple —

Babybot

Ludwig

They get more complex, e.g. Berti:,

to the extremely anthrobiomimetic CRONOS2:

to some serious engineering:

Domo:

iCub:

Saika:

Nasa’s Robonaut:

These use commercial arms and manipulators:

The UMASS Torso robot:

The Iowa torsobot:

And finally, these appear to be commercially available:

Hiro:

Motoman SDA10:

and the Meka (a descendent of Domo in commercial form):

so … the bodies are there.