All­purpose robots are not, of course, a new idea. “It's been 5 or 10 years from happening for about 50 years，” says Eric Berger, co­director of the Personal Robotics Program at Willow Garage, a Silicon Valley organization. The delay is in part because even simple tasks require a huge set of capabilities. For a robot to fetch a mug, for example, it needs to make sense of data gathered by a variety of sensors—laser scanners identifying potential blocking objects, cameras searching for the target, force feedback in the fingers that grasp the mug, and more. Yet Berger and other experts are confident that real progress could be made in the next decade.

　　The problem, according to Willow Garage, is the lack of a common platform for all that computational effort. Instead of enlarging the capabilities of a single machine, everyone is designing robots and the software to control them, from the ground up. To help change this, Willow Garage is currently producing 25 copies of its model PR2 ( Personal Robot 2), a two­armed, wheeled machine that can switch off the electricity, open doors and move through a room. Ten of the robots will stay in­house, but 10 more will go to outside research groups, and everyone will share their advances.

　　This way,

　　Berger says, if you want to build the robotic equivalent (等同物) of a Twitter, you won't start by constructing a computer. “You build the thing that's new.”

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