Robots could conquer roads and the moon

PALO ALTO -- For some, the pleasures of public radio and cell phone chitchat are enough to soothe the frustrations of commuting in the Bay Area.

Sebastian Thrun, director of Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is just not one of them.

Modern driving is inefficient and dangerous, "a waste of life, time and energy," he said. In the future, autonomous cars powered by robotics could eliminate the United States' annual

40,000 fatal car accidents and allow people to work or sleep in their cars -- all while reducing energy consumption, he predicted.

"Kids could drive themselves to soccer practice," he said.

Speaking with his frequent rival in robotics competitions, Carnegie Mellon robotics professor Red Whittaker, Thrun capped the first public meeting of the Menlo Park-based Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence recently by listing his goals for the new Stanford center opening next fall, named the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab, or more simply, CarLab.

"Our goals are to halve the number of traffic deaths, halve the commute time and double the fun of being in a car," Thrun said. The center, financed with a $5.75 million donation from Volkswagen, is slated to open in September, he said.

Whittaker said robotics can save lives, not only on the road, but also in dangerous industries like mining. Robotics can also make agriculture more productive, he said.

"A big agenda is feeding the world," he said.

But Whittaker's most high-profile recent project involves his entry into the Google Lunar X Prize competition, which will award $30 million to the first privately funded robot to travel 500 meters on the moon and transmit data back to Earth.

The moon's lack of atmosphere makes creating a functioning robot more challenging, he said. "It's unforgiving in a lot of ways."

By comparison, "Mars is pretty much a cakewalk," he said. He admitted, though, that "this one for the moon fires me up."

Whittaker and Thrun each have extensive experience with autonomous robots, and have often competed against each other in robotic car challenges. Both told tales of their respective victories in races sponsored by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or as Thrun put it, "the Woodstock of robotics."

Thrun said watching his robotic car, Junior, compete was like sending off a child to college.

"You hope they come back without scratches or dents, or not pregnant -- whatever you care about," he said.

The rapt crowd at the conference included engineer Morten Rufus Blas, a Danish robotics specialist working at the Stanford Research Institute.

"In Europe, we do a lot of robotics in agriculture, because labor is so expensive," he said. On the cutting edge are recently developed robots that milk cows and feed them a specific quantity of grain based on their most recent meal, he said.

Meanwhile, Russell Chou, a senior at Palo Alto's Gunn High School, thought autonomous robotics could move into the realm of personal health.

A good invention would be "a robot inside your body that helps regulate your systems, because people get sick all the time," he said.

While some inventions may seem like distant dreams, Thrun predicted autonomous cars could be fully commercial by 2030.

"When we get there, we'll think of the history of the car completely differently," he said.

E-mail Kristina Peterson at kpeterson@dailynewsgroup.com.

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