Why Making Robots Is So Darn Hard : The New Yorker

Why Making Robots Is So Darn Hard : The New Yorker: There are important incremental advances in robots virtually every day, and occasionally major breakthroughs, like the Microsoft Kinect 3-D sensor that makes affordable indoor 3-D vision for video games a realistic target. And one of the biggest new companies in robotics, Willow Garage, has recently open-sourced much of its software, which means that scores of young hackers around the globe won’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they build a new robot. But robot helpers as versatile as The Jetsons’ Rosie are still a long way away, with major hurdles in speed, safety, autonomy, and intelligence still to be solved.