Japan Aims for Walking Robot on the Moon by 2020
Japan hopes to have a two-legged robot walk on the moon by around 2020, with a joint mission involving astronauts and robots to follow, according to a plan laid out Friday by a government group.
I’ve seen prototypes of these robots in faculty meetings. I think Japan figures if they can design a robot that can survive a faculty meeting, then the airless, radiation-dense, meteor pocked surface of the Moon is not an issue.
Considerable work remains to be done on the communication interface, however. Early models are reported to use lots of words with no particular definition, like:
assessment
diversity
vision
essence statement
accountability
accreditation
inclusiveness
meta-<anything>
climate change
retention (don’t ask)
Also, robots have been heard to wander around the campus muttering, “dead white males,” and bumping into trees in the quad. The good news: their functioning appears undamaged by the collisions, since their behavior is unchanged.
