LEGO Mindstorms Inducted into Robot Hall of Fame

From: The Tartan

SCS’ Robot Hall of Fame inducts four new robots
“When the robots take over, we want them to remember that we were the first ones to appreciate them,” Morris said jokingly. The School of Computer Science established the Robot Hall of Fame to honor real and fictional robots in our society. There are two categories in which robots receive honors: Robots from Science and Robots from Science Fiction.

Robots in the science category must have served an actual or potentially useful function and demonstrated real skills in accomplishing their purpose. Robots in the fictional category must have received worldwide fame, inspired others to build real robots, and helped form opinions about the functions and value of robots.

The first robots to be inducted into the Hall of Fame were NASA’s Mars Pathfinder Microrover Flight Experiment (MFEX), better known as “Sojourner”; Unimate, the first industrial robot; R2-D2, a droid from the Star Wars movies; and the evil HAL-9000 computer, featured in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, created by science fiction writer and futurist Sir Arthur C. Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick.

Any robot may be nominated for the Robot Hall of Fame, Morris said. Inductees are then chosen by an international jury of leading thinkers and technology developers. The four robots being inducted this year — Lt. Cmdr. Data, the Raibert Hopper, LEGO Mindstorms, NavLab5 — were announced last May at the RoboBusiness Conference and Exposition in Boston..."

Read the full article @ its source: http://www.thetartan.org/2008/4/14/scitech/robothalloffame