Wis. Unlike most of the student-built robots at the robot confab, this little critter had no human minder. Red, purposeful and moving zestfully across the floor, it skirted obstacles, seeming to know exactly where it was and where it wanted to be. I figured some programmer had spent hours coding in the location of every booth, post and door in the exhibit hall. It turned out that the intelligence planning those brainy moves was inside a human skull. With a box controlling speed and direction in our grubby mitts, The Why Files tried to get the hang of guiding the robot by looking only at the video screen.
Robots are cheap enough for undergraduates to play with.
Navigation is the biggest single problem. It takes a heap of artificial intelligence to tell a robot how to respond when, say, a big foot appears in a detector. Robots need artificial smarts. Making a robot move and detect signals from its environment is much easier than helping its evaluate those signals and devise a course of action. Merely distinguishing a person from a post is quite a challenge for the average robot.