Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.


Archive for November 6th, 2011

 

“The U.S. Star in Humanoid Robotics”

November 6th, 2011 / in Research News / by Erwin Gianchandani

In today’s Washington Post Magazine, Dennis Hong, director of the Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech and “a leader in the movement to perfect the humanoid robot,” gets profiled: In the movies, robots are everywhere, boxing and shooting and running and flying and generally outdoing humans at every turn. In reality, the humanoid robot has a long way to go. Simply powering an autonomous robot is a nightmare; current battery technology allows a robot maybe 20 minutes of life, and (as one of Hong’s students told me) if you poke the power cell with a pencil, it will explode. Visual sensors are costly and erratic. The simple human act of walking […]