About that robot...

Yah so, here's me:

A couple years ago, and episode of "The Amazing Race" was on that featured the teams going to Korea where they had to use a small robot to play a game of soccer.

"Holy Shit!" I was blown away.

Like a lot of kids, I loved robots. When I say robots, I mean the kind in Star Wars, not the REAL, BORING kind. The kind that actually did things and talked and all that. I grew up in the 70's and saw Star Wars when I was 5 yrs. old. It blew my mind, of course. Since that day, I loved movie robots. I always ran around telling people I was going to build one and that it would be totally easy and blah, blah, blah. I was 5.

Real-life robots turned out to be uninspiring. I came to realize that robots, in real life, are best left to academics. By the 80's, with no real progress in robotics that I could see - they weren't talking and walking and acting like C-3p0 or R2-D2 yet - I sort of lost sight of any interest I had in robotics.

Ages passed, then I saw Asimo in the 90's. It blew my mind. I gaped and googled and wow! But it was still a big company with lots of money kind of thing, nothing that really got my hopes up.

Then out of nowhere, Amazing Race did the Korea episode. The teams gathered in a small room that looked like an empty store front. there were some ping-pong tables set up with goals on each side and everyday-looking Korean guys gathered around.

And there they were: 2 teams of small, humanoid, bipedal robots! What the HELL!? Then they started running around the soccer "field" playing soccer in a amzingly human-like way! My jaw was on the floor.

This wasn't some University research lab, those weren't scientists with super computers, and their robots weren't small, dumb, wheeled platforms that could follow lines. The way those little robots moved was unlike anything I had seen outside of Asimo. I forgot all about The Amazing Race and excitedly began googling everything i could think of to find info about those robots.

That was a few years ago, and now Im obsessed with robots again.