14 DAY TRIAL // When Isaac Asimov wrote his famous book, "I, Robot", he probably had no idea that his dreams would become a reality far quicker than anyone would have expected. We'll have to wait some more in order to see androids with pozitronic brains roaming the streets, but robots are already beginning to enter out everyday lives.
Let's take Rubi, for instance. It's a teacher's assistant at the Early Childhood Education Center in San Diego, and is part of an experiment to study how robots and humans interact. Rubi has the ability to track heads, detect faces and interpret basic expressions. And it also can teach the kids how to sing.
If Rubi is a friendly robot, we cannot say the same about Talon Sword, an autonomous vehicle with a machine gun (or rocket launcher) mounted on top that soldiers can fire from a remote location. And it's not the only robot used by the Army. The PackBot from iRobot, for instance, crawled into caves in Afghanistan to seek out Taliban fighters. In Iraq, robots equipped with chemical sensors get sent into sensitive areas in advance of troops.
And now returning to our everyday life, there's already a little robot out there that helps people around the house. The Roomba is an automatic vacuum cleaner and is about to become far more customizable in the home, due to the development of the Roomba Scheduler, which has a handheld remote control and lets people program vacuuming times and create two virtual walls, which prevent the Roomba from going beyond a certain point. And all for just $330.
Well, it's a long way from a vacuum cleaner to Mr. Data, but we're looking forward to the moment when we'll have a robot serve us breakfast in bed and bring us the morning paper