5/16/2007
My robot is bigger than your robot
If you believe reports in the Boston media (here and here) some denizens of Beantown take exception to the "Roboburgh" label that the Wall Street Journal gave Pittsburgh several years ago. As they see it, Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute and the city's nascent robotics industry get way too much attention, while MIT and Boston's larger robotics firms get short shrift.
Maybe they should call it "Bots-town."
We're not going to argue here over whose robot can beat up whose robot, but simply note that both Pittsburgh and Boston are well-represented among the robots that will be inducted this year in Carnegie Mellon's Robot Hall of Fame®. The inductees were announced Tuesday - in Boston - during the annual RoboBusiness Conference, a meeting for the robotics industry.
One inductee - the one-legged Raibert Hopper - actually bridges the two cities. Marc Raibert began experiments with the hopping machine when he was a professor at Carnegie Mellon in the early 1980s; in 1986 he moved to MIT and took his Leg Laboratory with him. He now is president of the company he founded, Boston Dynamics.
Another inductee is the LEGO Mindstorms robotics toy kit. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab developed educational tools that helped make the original Mindstorms popular and worthy of induction into the Hall of Fame. Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Academy is among the groups that have developed educational material for Mindstorms NXT, the latest version which was introduced last summer.
One inductee is pure Pittsburgh - the Robotics Institute's NavLab5 minivan, which steered itself most of the way on a coast-to-coast tour in 1995.
The final inductee is the android Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation." There's no obvious Boston or Pittsburgh connection to Data, though the Texas native who played Data in the series, Brent Spiner, once appeared on "Cheers", the NBC sitcom set in a Boston bar--and starring Carnegie Mellon alumnus Ted Danson.
So, does that make us even up?
Byron Spice
