Robots...

I've always liked robots...

My fascination began as a child watching the Munsters where Eddie creates a robot for the school science fair.

After that my neighbor and I spent a lot of time with Erector sets and various mechanical junk scavenged from anywhere we could get our hands on it trying to create a robot.   Of course we could get a small wheeled cart to roll around with a dummy body on top - but that was about it.

This of course led to other thoughts about how the robot would be able to see, or hear, or think.

Having no computer skills about all we could imagine was simple logic based on switches or relays.  But trying to build something interesting that would act on its own was simply out of the question.

Then there was the 1965 "Lost In Space" series.  At the time probably the most interesting "sci fi" TV show - complete with the "robot".  This, along with Star Trek reruns fueled my interests in robots and space travel.

But that was a lot of years ago.

These days I am most impressed by the Boston Scientific robots, "BigDog" in particular (also video here, there are other videos around the net but some have been removed by Stanford University for "copyright" reasons):

What I find most fascinating about these is how their legs move.  Very animal-like.

I also find it kind of ironic that the "BigDog" is powered by a gasoline engine.  That's right - no nasty lithium ion batteries or anything like that.  Plain and simple fossil fuel.  From the video it sounds like a simple two-cycle engine of some sort.

"BigDog" had been preceded by "LittleDog" (video here, not youtube so I cannot embed it...). 

This little guy is quite a bit more tentative than his big brother - though he seems to get the job done albeit more slowly.

I guess the most interesting part of all this is that the practical robots being created today are most like animals, dogs or mules, I suppose.  This makes a lot of sense when you think about it because its a lot harder to balance on two legs than four.

I suppose that a lot of today's practical interests in technology are fueled by childhood ideas spawned by TV and books.  Flat screen TVs, for example, a staple of 1960s sci fi, are a reality today.