It’s been 69 years Since Robbie the Robot in Forbidden Planet

When I was in grade school, I saw the movie Forbidden Planet and that was when I fell in love with the idea of robots.  I remember one year my dad made a robot suit that you could put on. My brother Mike put it on and stood on the porch during Halloween. People would come up to the house, it would be very quiet, and then he would begin to move and scare the pants off the kids waiting at the front door. It was awesome. 

When I was in high school. I read “I, Robot” by Isaac Asimov, a collection of short stories and again, I fell in love with robots. (Also read “Caves of steel”) 

It's been a long time coming, but robots are slowly becoming a reality. First with Boston Dynamics and now with Tesla. 

OK, robots have been used in manufacturing for quite a while, but none of them had that bi-ped human vibe. 

I've seen some videos of a Boston Dynamics robot that does not look humanoid in any way, shape or form that they've actually taught to take boxes off of an assembly line and stack them on palettes totally unsupervised. This is quite a breakthrough, but I haven't read about any factories actually putting these machines to use. 

Boston Dynamics has been doing cutting edge work in and robotics for decades. Their dog robot is named Spot and is not only functional, but also kind of creepy. Now we have the latest iteration of their robot Atlas. 

Boston Dynamics is using AI to teach their robot Atlas how to move. How to walk, run, even crawl, what's next? Break dancing?  

I've also seen some videos of Tesla robots doing things like serving drinks, but I found out later that those were just operated by remote control, they were not autonomous.  

Until I see the Atlas robot or the Optimus robot from Tesla doing really productive autonomous jobs in factories, you won't see many companies dropping 30 grand on a robot that just opens your front door and says hello but doesn't know how to receive a package from UPS.