Hot Bots

A Jetson-Worthy Jeep

"There are a lot of new ideas occurring today because it's so cheap to try them out," says Larry Barello, president of the Seattle Robotic Society, one of the most active U.S. robot groups, with more than 1500 amateur members who meet regularly, sponsor competitions, and visit local schools. "You can put together a sophisticated robot lab for a couple hundred bucks now, which was unheard of a few years ago."

What kind of ideas has that freedom inspired? Consider this: The Department of Defense faces a congressional mandate that one-third of its vehicles drive themselves by 2010. In 2003, not satisfied with its own progress, DARPA, the government-funded defense research facility, opened a robot design contest, the Grand Challenge, to the public. Vying for a $1 million prize, 106 teams signed up that year to try to create a robotic vehicle that could travel 150 miles through the desert in less than 10 hours. After the qualifying rounds, 16 teams entered the race, but none of their creations completed it. Undaunted, DARPA has scheduled Grand Challenge 2 for October 2005 and upped the prize to $2 million. Applications are pouring in.

"The prize is important, but a lot of people want to do this for the bragging rights," says Ron Kurjanowicz, DARPA's chief of staff and the contest's program manager. "The picture taken of the winning team will be the photograph that enters the history books."

Rick Ruhkick, an engineering technician at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, wants to be in that photo. His team of volunteers, Arctic Tortoise, wanted to enter the first challenge but failed to complete its vehicle--a tricked-out 1992 Jeep Cherokee--on time. Arctic Tortoise is well on its way now though, Ruhkick says, thanks to recent improvements made to the Jeep's sensors and electronic and mechanical gear. Of course, training in Alaska for a desert robot run presents its own challenges. "We don't have much desert up here," he says.

A self-driving Jeep Cherokee is a good ways down the road from society's initial fascination with automatons. Though the exact origins of robotics are debatable, many enthusiasts point to Czechoslovakian playwright Karel Capek's 1920 play, Rossum's Universal Robots (RUR), where the term robot first occurred. The word derives from the Czech robota, which means tedious labor. In the play, a young woman travels to a remote island factory owned by a mad-scientist type who has created a fleet of robots to do his bidding. Other people claim that Isaac Asimov's seminal Runaround, in which Asimov spelled out the Three Laws of Robotics, was the flashpoint.

Popular culture has not lost its fascination with (or trepidation about) robots, as evidenced by last summer's movies I, Robot and The Stepford Wives.