Many of the wheeled robots came across as essentially remote-controlled forklifts with faces drawn on the front. It’s possible that they were autonomous and smart, but this wasn’t obvious from the sterile demonstrations. A laundry basket full of tennis balls could really spice up this show next year.
This one is meant to act as a receptionist — the brochure placed a lot of emphasis on its ‘Low Center of Gravity’ from which we can easily guess what happened during last year’s show.
There were a fair number of smallish humanoid robots which were cute and nice to watch.
But, watching them step nervously across tables, or tip over, or dance awkward, useless dances, I’m really starting to wonder what the big idea was with bipedality anyway. It’s the robots with six legs, or with tank treads, that can really get around.
And, don’t even get me started on bilateral symmetry. If you want your machine to really know what’s happening, you need to move beyond the single axis:
