Principal Research Scientist
Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Hans P. Moravec is a Principal Research Scientist in the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. He has been thinking about machines thinking since he was a child in the 1950s, building his first robot, a construct of tin cans, batteries, lights and a motor, at age ten. In high school he won two science fair prizes for a light-following electronic turtle and a tape-controlled robot hand. As an undergraduate he designed a computer to control fancier robots, and experimented with learning and automatic programming on commercial machines. During his master's work he built a small robot with whiskers and photoelectric eyes controlled by a minicomputer, and wrote a thesis on a computer language for artificial intelligence. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1980 for a TV-equipped robot, remote controlled by a large computer, that negotiated cluttered obstacle courses, taking about five hours. Since 1980 his Mobile Robot Lab at Carnegie Mellon has discovered more effective approaches for robot spatial representation, notably 3D occupancy grids, that, with newly available computer power, promise commercial free-ranging mobile robots within a decade. His books, Mind Children: the future of robot and human intelligence, 1988, and Robot: mere machine to transcendent mind, 1998, consider the implications of evolving robot intelligence. He has published many papers and articles in robotics, computer graphics, multiprocessors, space travel and other speculative areas.
Dr. Moravec received his MSc. in Computer Science from the University of Western Ontario (1971), and his BSc. in Mathematics at Acadia University in Nova Scotia (1969) and a B.S. in Engineering from Loyola College (1967). He has been an activie consultant in industry and is the author of numerous articles and publications.
Dr. Moravec's presentation is titled, "Mass Utility Robots this Decade, Finally!"
