A review of the Robots episode

robotbling

Modern Marvels' episode takes a look at the history of mobile robots in the United States. The show begins with the original Shaky and Stanford Cart, all the way up to the massive field robots developed by Red Whittaker at Carnegie Mellon to deal with nuclear accidents. It's particularly interesting because there really weren't any machines (robots or otherwise) capable of dealing with these sorts of disasters before Whittaker and his team began developing them.

While some have criticized Japan for failing to build practical robots capable of dealing with situations like the Fukushima plant, the United States was in the same position when the meltdown occurred at the Three Mile Island reactor. Whittaker jokes that the start-up he founded was the robotics equivalent of an ambulance chaser, making bank on the backs of disasters as they happened. It then goes into some of the early legged robots and autonomous vehicles.

Though it does touch very lightly on humanoids, it almost goes out of its way to tiptoe around Japan's dominance in that area (perhaps not to upset WW2 buffs, the History Channel's target demographic). Instead of Japanese humanoids (of which only familiar clips of Honda's P2 are shown despite the episode airing in 2004!), it focuses on the comparably simplistic animatronics for entertainment and Nolan Bushnell's failed household robotics venture Androbot. Even though our beloved humanoids are not the focus of the episode, it's still a history lesson worth taking, though its American bias is slightly annoying.

Modern Marvels also did a couple of episodes with robotic tangents ("Super Human" has a short segment on Raytheon SARCOS's exoskeleton).

score 7/10

robotbling 4 December 2011

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2528023/