How robots think: an introduction

A future full of helpful robots, quietly going about their business and assisting humans in thousands of small ways, is one of technology's most long-deferred promises. Only recently have robots started to achieve the kind of sophistication and ubiquity that computing's pioneers originally envisioned. The military has hundreds of UAVs blanketing the skies above Iraq and Afghanistan, and Roombas are vacuuming living rooms across the country. At the bleeding edge, there's the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005. This grueling, 140-mile, no-humans-allowed race through the desert showcased full-sized, completely autonomous robot cars that could navigate across rugged desert terrain, avoiding rocks and cliffs and cacti in a race for a $2 million cash prize. The follow-on 2007 Urban Challenge went even further, with the robotic competitors required to drive alongside humans on crowded roads, recognizing and avoiding other cars and following the rules of the road. Suddenly, the robotic future doesn't look so far off.

In some ways, the remarkable thing is that it took so long to get here. In the 1960's, researchers in artificial intelligence were boldly declaring that we'd have thinking machines fully equivalent to humans in 10 years. Instead, for most of the past half-century, the only robots we saw outside of movies and labs were arms confined to factory floors and were remotely operated by humans. Building machines that behaved intelligently in the real world was harder than anyone imagined.

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