This years Robot Hall of Fame Inductees include the one-legged Raibert Hopper, the NavLab 5 self-steering vehicle, the LEGO® Mindstorms kit and Lieutenant Commander Data. For the first time since the Robot Hall of Fame came to being the majority of the inductees are actually REAL robots instead of fictional ones. This might signal a new wave in the robotics industry as the human inventors and developers are starting to make better robots that are closer to what humans only once dreamed we were capable of making. It also shows the jury’s respect and admiration for developers and as a way of encouraging developers to keep on making newer and more innovative designs. As Matt Mason, director of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute put it, “As much as we love fictional robots such as Data, those of us in the robotics field take heart when the real accomplishments of our colleagues get this well-deserved recognition.”

The Robot Hall of Fame, created in 2003, was formed to recognize excellence in robotics technology worldwide and to honor the fictional and real robots that have inspired and made breakthrough accomplishments in robotics. The jury is assembled each year by Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and is comprised of scholars, researchers, writers, designers, and entrepreneurs.

The Inductees:

Lt. Cmdr. Data (fictional) - An android, Data was the chief operations officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise

Raibert Hopper (real)- one-legged device built by roboticist Marc Raibert in the early 1980s

NavLab 5 (real) - one of a series of autonomous vehicles developed at Carnegie Mellon that was able to complete a cross-country tour in 1995 on which it did 98 percent of the driving

LEGO Mindstorms (real) - Everyone knows LEGO. This is the high tech version with a set combined programmable bricks with electric motors, sensors and structural parts to create robots and other interactive systems.