Almost Human' Robots On Horizon

While wandering in the dead of night through the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, writer Lee Gutkind briefly mistook a robot for a person. The machine in question, known as Grace, or Graduated Robot Attending a Conference, was designed to schmooze and glad-hand with human attendees at a gathering sponsored by the American Assn. for Artificial Intelligence. "The way she talked — the direct manner in which she confronted me — made her seem real enough so that, for an instant, I felt off-balance," Gutkind writes. But the illusion was short-lived, because the robot's body "resembled an oil canister and it navigated the hallway on wheels." Before 2050, Manuela Veloso, a Portuguese electrical engineer with a PhD in artificial intelligence, hopes to have created a robot soccer team good enough to compete against humans in the World Cup championships. And chic French planetary geologist Nathalie Cabrol seeks to model a robot after part of herself — not the chic part but the part that can tell an interesting rock from a boring one. The differences between roboticists seem far less significant than what they share: a passion for robot autonomy. "We are all nerds," explains a space scientist with the robotics team. "The robotics guys are baby nerds and we are older nerds. But we are all driven by the desire to unravel a complex intellectual puzzle."