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Hans Moravec

Adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University.

Hans Moravec is chief scientist of Seegrid Corporation, maker of vision-guided industrial mobile robots. He had been research professor in the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, where he retains an adjunct faculty position. 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 PhD 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 CMU 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. In 2003 he co-founded SEEGRID Corporation to undertake this commercialization. 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 also published papers and articles in robotics, computer graphics, multiprocessors, space travel and other speculative areas.

Visit website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Moravec

See also: Academia Carnegie Mellon University - Private research university known for its exceptional computer science and engineering programs

Details last updated 03-Dec-2020

Hans Moravec News

How Science Can Make Us Immortal

Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) - 12-Feb-2016

Many respectable scientists now believe that humans can overcome death. We will simultaneously d...

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