Robot as Servant

The 1980s promised robotic servants were in reach. They’d clean
up our houses. Bring us drinks. Usher in an era of leisure. We
didn’t get robot butlers. But if we look around, we’ll find an
army of robotic servants already automating away domestic
drudgery. 

Richard Rowland recounts the extent to which Androbot
over-promised on its ability to build a robot servant. 40 years
later, we still don’t have robot maids. Monroe Kennedy III walks
us through the complexities of seemingly simple tasks. To make
things more difficult, each attempt to build a robot had to build
the hardware AND write the code from scratch. Keenan Wyrobek
explains that’s why he helped write and share the Robot Operating
System (ROS). Leila Takayama describes how beneficial ROS was to
the field of robotics. And Terry Fong shares how NASA is using
ROS to build the robots that explore our solar system.


If you want to read up on some of our research on domestic
robots, you can check out all our bonus material over at
redhat.com/commandlineheroes. 

Follow along with the episode transcript.