The Robot Hall of Fame, based at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, will announce its 2007 inductees at the RoboBusiness Conference and Exposition in May. (I’m sure it’s a very serious conference, but I just can’t get past the idea of a big hall filled with robots in suits exchanging cards.)

Though last year’s winners included the AIBO and SCARA commercial bots, the three fictional machines were much more interesting: Gort and Maria, from The Day The Earth Stood Still and Metropolis respectively, are two of the most memorable and important robots ever put on film. The third, David from Spielberg’s AI, is less compelling; couldn’t they have gone with Jude Law’s male prostitute instead?

In other robonews, the Japanese city of Kobe is building a 60-foot statue of famous manga character Ironman No. 28 – also known as Gigantor – as a symbol of the city’s rebirth from the devastating 1995 earthquake. That’s all well and good, but if anything goes wrong, will it understand “Klaatu Barada Nikto”?

Link to Robot Hall of Fame
Link to Gigantor at Loving the Machine

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See Also: Functioning Transformer Robot,Weeding Robot,Reproducing Robot (kind of),

This entry was posted by Jeffrey Goodman on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 11:20 am and is filed under Design, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.