Hey robots, census wants to know all about you

Results of the census, we are told, can influence the allocation of federal funds for education programs, law enforcement, and highways--and apparently tell us how many crazy robots are running loose. Well, at least the Carnegie Mellon Robot Census 2010 can tell us the last one. So far, it has tallied 547 robots on the CMU campus, including Tank LaFleur the "roboceptionist," Boss, winner of the 2008 DARPA Grand Challenge, and Opto-Isolator, the artbot that watches you with its big roving eye. It all started when Heather Knight, a first-year Ph.D. student at CMU's Robotics Institute, decided bots at the school deserved to stand up and be formally counted. "As much as we're here for the professors," she explained, "we're also here for the robots."