Admit it, as a child you thought you’d have a robotic housecleaner by
now—like Rosie on The Jetsons. Sure, the robotic vacuum the Roomba is
one of the best-selling consumer robots, but the humanoid robots that
seemed inevitable in science fiction have not yet become a reality. Over
the past 50 years the robotics research community has experienced a
series of stops and starts as scientists discovered that the problems of
robotic sensing and movement were more difficult than anyone imagined.
