Hans Moravec

Chief Scientist, Seegrid Corporation

Hans Moravec teaches at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. Following degrees in mathematics, he received his PhD from Stanford University in 1980 for creating a television-equipped robot remotely controlled by a computer capable of negotiating an obstacle courses. He co-founded the SEEGRID Corporation in 2003, a robotics company whose stated purpose it to create a fully autonomous robot capable of navigating its environment without human intervention. He is also the author of Mind Children, an examination of Moore's Law and its consequences on technological progress and ramifications for future society.

Since 1981 the Mobile Robot Laboratory of The Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University has conducted basic research on autonomous robots. They have built three mobile robots, developing new concepts in vision, sonar guided navigation, and robot control. In the last three years they have concentrated on a probabilistic representation of spatial knowledge termed "Evidence Grids." These form an efficient unifying solution for the interpretation of vision, sonar, laser and touch and other sensor data, for transforming sensorial information from multiple noisy sources into clear images of the robot's surroundings, providing a sense of spatial awareness for our robots.

Dr. Moravec said, regarding his conviction that the future of artificial general intelligence in a robotic substrate will come quicker than most living today anticipate, "It may seem rash to expect fully intelligent machines in a few decades, when the computers have barely matched insect mentality in a half-century of development. Indeed, for that reason, many long-time artificial intelligence researchers scoff at the suggestion, and offer a few centuries as a more believable period. But there are very good reasons why things will go much faster in the next fifty years than they have in the last fifty... Since 1990, the power available to individual AI and robotics programs has doubled yearly, to 30 MIPS (machine instructions per second) by 1994 and 500 MIPS by 1998. Seeds long ago alleged barren are suddenly sprouting. Machines read text, recognize speech, even translate languages. Robots drive cross-country, crawl across Mars, and trundle down office corridors. In 1996 a theorem-proving program called EQP running five weeks on a 50 MIPS computer at Argonne National Laboratory found a proof of a Boolean algebra conjecture by Herbert Robbins that had eluded mathematicians for sixty years. And it is still only Spring. Wait until Summer."