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Today's Toys: Robotics Testing Ground

Linda Cashdan, Voice of America
April 9, 2001

Tekno, The Robotic Puppy

Today's toy stores feature dolls that coo in response to touch and sound and animals that follow commands and avoid obstacles as they walk. That is because the toy industry has become a testing ground for the robotics industry.

The sophisticated combination of electronics and software empowering today's toys may run tomorrow's household robots, according to engineer Pradeep Khosla, at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. "When you and I talk, between looking at my eyes, looking at my hand motion, my body language and understanding my speech, you are able to understand what it is that I am trying to convey to you," he said.

Mr. Khosla is presently working on programming robots to duplicate that human response, so that in the future robots might be able to function as helpers for the elderly or the handicapped.

He says he has made some gains - robots that respond to hand signals, voice commands, light and darkness and those gains are visible on today's toy market.

"The toy industry is what it is today because of all the developments we have made," said Mr. Khosla. "They are also helping, because the toy industry has access to a very large market, and the technologies that they develop are much cheaper than if we were developing the technologies for a much smaller market, which is what the robotics industry is."

Jeff Burnstein of the Robotics Industries Association says a robot, by definition, is a piece of equipment that is multifunctional, one that can be reprogrammed to do many different tasks.

Home robot helpers may be a distant dream, he says, but industrial robots are an essential part of most factories today. "You have robots picking up something, and perhaps packaging it - packaging cookies or chocolate," said Mr. Burnstein. "In addition, of course, they are welding cars and painting cars and helping build computers and a number of other products."

As for the future, Pradeep Khosla says a person will be able to turn to his or her robot helper and say - Get me a Coca Cola. That robot will then walk to the refrigerator and open the door. "And, if it realizes it can not recognize what a coke bottle is in the clutter, it might come back and reflect an image of what it sees in the refrigerator, and that person would be able to point to a bottle and say that is the coke bottle," he said.

That future is about 20 years off, Mr. Khosla estimates. The children playing with robot toys today could be the first generation to live with robots in their homes as adults.

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