Popular Mechanics - Report on the 2006 IEEE Robotics conference

Fascinating brief update with links

A Meeting Of The Metal Minds

ORLANDO, Fla — Robots vacuum our homes, search for landmines, perform surgery, and explore Mars. They’ve been taught to dance, play chess, arm wrestle, and ballroom dance. For all of this service and goodwill toward men, robots deserve credit, but fictional and cinematic slams are the norm. You know the plot: Machines rebel, humanity is enslaved, and Asimov rolls in his grave.

One hears of no such silliness at the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), held this week at the Walt Disneyworld Hilton in Orlando, Florida. One of the largest conferences of its type, ICRA attracts more than a thousand leading roboticists from North America, Europe, Japan, Japan, and Japan. This year’s theme is “Humanitarian Robotics.” If you’re willing to brave presentations with titles such as “Force Tracking Control for Constrained Robot with Uncertainties”—and can stomach industrial-grade linear algebra before you’ve finished your morning coffee—this is the place for learning the latest on robotics. ICRA draws the scientists, programmers, and engineers who really have their heads under the hoods. Or torsos. Or . . . you get the idea.

Popular Mechanics - A Meeting Of The Metal Minds.