What are some cool things going on in robotics right now that Hollywood is missing?
I think a lot of it is already in the movies. JPL primarily works on space exploration systems, but there’s a large part of the robotic community working on military robotics. The reality is that there are a lot of robots that are being used in the military and the projection of what might be done in the future is already out there in movies, something on the periphery of the whole Terminator series would be a direction where robots might go in – and the Battlestar Galactica [Created by Glen A. Larson] stuff. But that’s the negative interpretation of what might happen. It shows robots in a warfare scenario. It’s interesting to look at some positive areas where people don’t think of robots being used. You have medical robotics, where you have the da Vinci system, which is doing certain surgery. Really, it’s just a tele-operated system, so really it’s just a neat tool for surgeons, but in Logan’s Run [Screenplay by David Zelag Goodman]… Where they blow up the old people? Yeah, but if y
