Robots have become commonplace at the dawn of the twenty-first century. They build cars and MP3 players. They’ve visited Mars and the hydrothermal vents deep beneath our oceans. They destroy each other for fun and profit on television. And yes, some are weapons, designed to kill people. You may recall that in November of last year, one of our Predator <http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/x-45_debut_020523.html> robot planes flying over Yemen fired a Hellfire missile at a car, killing six suspected Al Qaeda members.

As I try to keep up with developments in robotics and A.I., I find it increasingly unlikely that any class of robots will ever be subject to Isaac’s laws. Indeed, when we touched on the Singularity <http://www.jimkelly.net/pages/singular.htm> in an earlier installment, we saw that some very smart people believe that machine intelligence will someday surpass our own, making humankind obsolete at best. And you thought Terminator <http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~haakonhj/Terminator/index.cgi> was just another Schwarzenegger flick.

Robots are everywhere on the march. A great place to begin counting them is The Cool Robot of the Week <http://ranier.hq.nasa.gov/telerobotics_page/coolrobots.html> site. Folks at NASA <http://ranier.hq.nasa.gov/> have been keeping track of interesting sites devoted to real world robots since 1996. Over the past seven years the site has honored tattooing robots <http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_718442.html?menu=>, snake robots <http://voronoi.sbp.ri.cmu.edu/projects/prj_snake.html> and Troody <http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/chunks/chunks.html> a robotic dinosaur, to name but a few. Of particular interest to science fiction aficionados is the cool robot site from June 24, 2002: John Chapin’s Lab <http://www.rybak-et-al.net/chapin.html>. Dr. Chapin stunned the world with an experiment in which rats manipulated a robot arm by brain activity alone. Could neural jacking be just around the corner?

Of all the robots we have launched into space, my favorite was the Microrover Flight Experiment (MFEX), better known as the Sojourner rover <http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/rover/sojourner.html>, which rolled out of the Pathfinder lander onto the Ares Vallis on July 5, 1997. This little robot operated twelve times its design lifetime and returned data from a number of experiments, one of which was designed by frequent Asimov contributor Geoffrey A. Landis <http://www.sff.net/people/ Geoffrey.Landis>. And the robots are scheduled to return to the Red Planet; Geoff has recently been selected to be a participating scientist on the Mars Exploration Rover mission <http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer>, which should launch in June 2003. By the way, although this is a column on robots, I must pause here to urge you to click the Pathfinder website <http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/ index1.html> for some of the most amazing photography of Mars you have ever seen.

I would be remiss were I not to mention the Honda Robot Top Page <http://world.honda.com/ robot> devoted to its prototype humanoid robot. According to Honda, engineers came up with the name for this bot by taking the first letters of Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility. That’s right, friends, C3PO’s great-great-great-grandfather is named ASIMO. He’s (he?) a cute little guy, weighing in at about ninety-five pounds and standing just under four feet tall. He looks sort of like an Imperial Storm Trooper from the first Star Wars <http://www.starwars.com>, only rounder and with bigger feet. He is one of the most accomplished two-legged walking bots ever made: he can take big steps and baby steps, vary his pace, step side to side, change direction while he’s walking and negotiate stairs. If you lived in Japan you could rent him for your trade show. But as impressive as ASIMO is, he’s a long way from R. Daneel Olivaw, more’s the pity.

Media fans are advised to head straight for Fred Barton Productions Inc’s Robby the Robot <http: //www.the-robotman.com/nv_fs. html>, named for the scene-stealing automaton from the movie Forbidden Planet <http://sfstation.members.easyspace.com/fbhome.htm>. Mr. Barton’s site makes the grand claim that he is internationally known as "The Robot Man," and he delivers the goods. Literally. Mr. Barton will sell you an exact 1:1 scale replica of Robby that "incorporates a digital audio sound-track from the movie that lights the nine mercury-vapor neon tubes in his mouth synchronously with the robot’s original voice as heard in the film." Oh, man, my inner nine-year-old is pitching a fit! CanIhaveonepleasepleasepleasecan- IpleasecanI? Elsewhere on the site is "The Amazing Robot Museum," which traces the history of robots in movies from the 1920s to the present. About the only part of this very cool site that disappoints is the links page. There are but two, one of which is for The Robot Hut.

Although not as slick as Fred Barton Productions, The Robot Hut <http://www.robothut.robot nut.com> is funky and fun. Reading between the HTML, it would seem to be the work of one John Rigg, who has built for himself the largest private robot museum in the world. You see the actual Robot Hut on the index page, a big red barnlike structure that has been photoshopped into an alien landscape. Elsewhere on the site you can tour The Robot Hut in 3D–you provide the glasses–and watch videos of clanking, talking, laughing, smoking, singing robot toys and models. You can even arrange for a visit, although I take it that The Robot Hut is not open to the general public. Oh, and the links page here is very good; it even includes a source for free 3D glasses!

A much sillier robot site is We Are Robots <http://www.wearerobots.com>, which features some hilarious flash movies about a group of cartoon robots who harangue the viewer about their personal problems. I liked Sad Robot, a morose real estate salesman, and Keg-O-Matic, the clueless college bot, but my fave was Angrybot. Imagine a metal middle linebacker painted hellfire red with the voice of one of Tony Soprano’s less genteel henchpersons as you read this bit of his rant, "All the time people are telling me to shut up and you know what I say to them, I say, no, I don’t shut up, you shut up and then I would spit on them only I can’t because I’m a robot but I make a spitting noise like ptui, ptui, like that. (pause) My job? I’m a high school music teacher, so what?" All of the bots are the creations of designer and animator Brian Frisk.