Thursday, July 12, 2007

Step Over....Here

According to an article on the BBC News web site (why, again, don't we have material like this from US news organizations?), a device known as Runbot has been created that can walk autonomously. Runbot is an a bipedal device, meaning that it has two legs, and it can move at someone less than the speed of a quickly walking human.

Whats particularly interesting is that this is controlled by local circuitry, not a central 'brain'. Thats much the same as the way that we learn to walk -- the brain controls it at first, but then the knowledge of how to do it moves down the autonomic food chain, and we just don't have to think about it any more unless something changes radically about the environment -- say, a rocky terrain or slippery slope. For everything else, our lower-order processes handle movement without conscious thought.

Can the Terminator be far behind?

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