Take a look at this video showing DARPA's Pet-Proto robot navigating an obstacle course and put those bad dreams you have of Terminator pursuit out of your heads. It's going to be quite a while before robot pursuit becomes real.
In this video, the Pet-Proto, a predecessor to DARPA's Atlas robot, is confronted with obstacles similar to those robots might face in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). To maneuver over and around the obstacles, the robot exercises capabilities including autonomous decision-making, dismounted mobility and dexterity. The DARPA Robotics Challenge will test these and other capabilities in a series of tasks that will simulate conditions in a dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environment. Teams participating in Tracks B and C of the DRC will compete for access to a modified version of the Atlas robot for use in the 2013 and 2014 live disaster-response challenge events.
This robot derives from the PETMAN robot, who has been making real progress. PETMAN started out as a kind of consumption robots, as described by Frederik Pohl in his 1954 short story The Midas Plague.
For now, though, you can rest easy. Pet-Proto has a long way to go before matching the Terminator's relentless pursuit gait.
Humanoid Robots Building Humanoid Robots
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?'' - Isaac Asimov (1940)
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Humanoid Robots Building Humanoid Robots
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
Stratospheric Solar Geoengineering From Harvard
'Pina2bo would have to operate full blast for many years to put as much SO2 into the stratosphere as its namesake had done in a few minutes.'