Look ma, I made a robot

"I wanna hire the guy that makes the machine that makes Pop-Tarts," says Chase Dudley, co-founder of Beyond Theory. The idea is that the Pop-Tart machine "just goes all day and cranks out Pop-Tarts.""For us, one of the main concerns is reliability," says Chase's partner and co-founder, Shane Adams. "To have a functional device is great. But it's not great when it breaks." Especially when the device is your arm. The goal, he says, is to create a robotic device that's as consistent and manipulable as the human arm itself. "Can this be used 22 hours straight?" he asks rhetorically. Not yet, but that's the goal.Just ask Siddhartha Srinivasa, an associate professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, who oversees the Home Exploring Robot Butler project.

Although the immediate goal is to design a machine that can perform "challenging manipulation tasks in places where people live and work," the broader goal is to create a robot that can exist and interact seamlessly with a human environment. A robot that can tell when it's bumping into someone, for instance. Or that can find and retrieve a milk carton from the refrigerator. A robot that can be, in a sense, human. Srinivasa says HERB's not there quite yet. But that's the goal."No one really knows what the robot of the future is going to look like," Srinivasa says. "And that's the beauty of robotics. It's not so rigidly structured — like a car, for example. Robots can be anything. And so, we're still in the stage where we're trying to figure out what these robots should look like, what they should be, how they should behave."

Technology can be a lot of fun. Akshat Dobhal, the Class VII student who stood beside a four-wheeled programmed robot at the Mad About Technology Festival, is a firm believer of this maxim."It will follow voice commands. You can say 'move', 'go back', 'spin' and it will do exactly that," he says. The bystander says "move" and the contraption indeed begins to move forward. "Stop! Go back," says the astounded bystander, and the machine wheels right back. But Akshat is now smiling, and his friends ask him what his hands are doing under the table.Game over. It's not a voice-controlled robot, but a remote-controlled one, which Akshat now reveals with a laugh. "We're trying to see how many people we can fool this way," he said, divulging the scientific intent of the prank.