Machines Like Us

Yesterday, Carnegie Mellon, one of America's leading universities in the emerging field of robotics, announced that it had developed a new series of robots that could be designed using off-the-shelf software and hardware and were simple enough for novices and grade-schoolers to use. The robotic tool kit is dubbed Terk (short for Telepresense Robot Kit), and the project was funded by Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), and Intel.

However, the project's leader, Illah Nourbakhsh, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, was quick to point out that the purpose of the project was to get students -- especially students who might not ordinarily be interested in building robots (e.g., non-geeks) -- interested in the field of robotics. More specifically, he added that there was "no incentive" to make money off of the project.

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