Word: robots
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With its round head, beady eyes and red-buttoned pot belly, it looks like an armless, three-foot-high plastic snowman. Rolling across the floor on big black wheels, it embodies one of man's most enduring dreams: the personal robot, programmed to do its master's bidding. Inside its molded skull a kind of sassy intelligence seems to be at work. "What strange-looking creatures," it intones nasally in the direction of some gawking visitors at its home base, Androbot, Inc., in Sunnyvale, Calif. "Where are your wheels...
...robot's name is BOB (Brains On Board). At present it cannot even fetch a beer from the refrigerator, but its buoyant creator, High-Tech Millionaire Nolan Bushnell, 40, forsees an almost boundless future for the $2,500 machine. Concerned about crime in your neighborhood? Not to worry, "Home security," says Bushnell, "is just moments away." With the proper software, he claims, BOB could patrol a house and call the police when its heat sensor sniffs an intruder. When BOB isn't watching the house, he could be cleaning it. "As soon...
...look like the canvases of a painter. In fact, the pictures are a new form of art, of the high-tech kind. Photographed from 440 miles out in space, they are views of the earth by the U.S.'s newest and most versatile earth-observing satellite, a multieyed robot called Landsat 4. Launched last July, it has been faithfully circling the globe, swinging from pole to pole and back again once every 98.9 minutes, taking electronic shots of every spot on the planet, except a small region around the poles. These images are a source of information about crops...
Peering into the heavens from its orbital perch, the $180 million robot observatory "sees" infrared light, or heat waves, a form of radiation totally beyond the range of human vision (and that of most living things other than rattlesnakes). Even cold objects radiate some heat, making it possible for IRAS to sense celestial bodies that are all but undetectable in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum...
...slalom skier, placed second to him in a European health institute's study of the strength in athletes' legs. Then there were Borg's instincts. He was fitted with enough quickness even before trophy was installed, magnified by his almost eerie eyesight. "He's a robot from outer space," was always Court Jester Ilie Nastase's hushed theory, "a Martian." But of all the elements of the world's best tennis player (from 1976 to 1981, at least), his concentration was the most astounding. As it turns out, that beady-eyed resolve...