I want my 3PO

Whatever happened to Robots? You know, humanoid metal friends that were once widely expected to be all over the place by now, but that didn't happen. Shame. I would have like to have one of those. I hate ironing.

This weekend OGD is organizing Technival, a wonderful collection of geeky and fun activities wrapped in Saturday and sunshine (or so we hope). One of the many cool things to do is fight virtual robot wars with real drones, using Parrot AR drones and iPads. However, it's still us at the controls.

There are actually quite a lot of 'robots', building cars, vacuuming houses and manipulating fuel rods. Most of these are basically automatons, with about as much interactivity as a coffee machine. Not really Asimov-grade R. Daneel Olivaw material.

In the virtual world there are also a lot of bots. Contrary to their meatspace co-inhabiting counterparts, these are highly interactive. While not quite capable of passing the Turing test, they are quite able to kill n00bs in MMORPG games, do some basic chat-based customer support on websites, and navigate virtual environments with some aplomb. Virtual bots are altogether much more sophisticated than the physical varieties. However, uploading Sansha Sleeper spawn algorithms into a Rhoomba vacuum cleaner will not produce an (evil) R2D2, not quite. The complexity gap between what we can program and what we can build is too great, and somehow programming the physical to perform at the level of the virtual bots is a lot harder.

Why the missing link? Is bipedal walking really that hard? Is there an energy-density problem preventing bots from roaming freely? Or are we just unable to program any simile of a spark into a lifeless creation?

All three are big factors leading to the dearth of robots on the streets today. Walking is pretty tough, batteries are expensive, heavy and weak, and however many cores we equip our computers with, they still lack originality. Topio, for example, moves well and plays table tennis, but is not much of a chess player, even though his hardware and processing capability could theoretically play the game. It simply wasn't built for this purpose and is unable to adapt.

Thankfully there are some promising trends. There are fairly mature navigation and collision-avoidance systems for cars, and parking-assist is gaining popularity. Ere long cars will be at least partially capable of driving themselves. The aforementioned Roomba vacuuming bot is popular and faces increasing competition, with models from Samsung, Phillips and others vying for your living room floor, and doing a good job of it. The Parrot drones at Technival are capable of hovering themselves steadily, maintaining equilibrium with their gyros and rotors, and are quite good at recognizing each other mid-flight.

One day I hope to have a metal man show up at my front door to deliver himself fresh from the factory into my service. I really do hate ironing.

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Update: Concidentally, today's XKCD is hugely relevant: http://xkcd.com/948/