Artificial Intelligence Marches Forward

Rodney Brooks has what seems like modest career goals: to achieve the manual dexterity of a 6-year-old and the object-recognition skills of a toddler.

Written byLaura Spinney

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The MIT-built learning biped moves based on the principles behind passive "ramp-walking" machines. (From S. Collins et al., Science, 307:1082–5, 2005).

Rodney Brooks has what seems like modest career goals: to achieve the manual dexterity of a 6-year-old and the object-recognition skills of a toddler. But for the moment, his field of robotics remains in its infancy. "Over the past 20 years we've gotten pretty good at navigation," says Brooks, who heads Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "But none of the robots manipulates the environment. None of them really understands the objects they encounter outside of the lab."

A toddler, by contrast, can recognize a cup as a cup, even if its shape or size changes, while a six-year-old can tie her own shoelaces. For robotics, what it will take to reach those goals is a tremendous advance in artificial intelligence. A ...

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