Happy Silver Anniversary, Artificial Intelligence! Twenty five years is not long in the history of a science--long enough to achieve, short enough to remember. Your esteemed founders are still around -- vigorous, not so young anymore. Out of the cybernetics you came, and information-theoretic psychology. You were born in the early days of modern computing, on hot, bulky hardware with names few now remember, like JOHNNIAC; in strange and wonderful software called list structures, with stacks you could "push down" and "pop-up," bearing arcane acronyms like IPL and FLPL. Time-sharing? One signed up on the schedule. Interaction? One pushed keys on the console teleype or panel.

I am absolutely delighted to be able to join in this morning to offer my reflections on the occasion of the official beginning of the Robotics Institute. Beginnings are full of promise and potential. This one is no exception. What the Robotics Institute will become -- what effects it will have, both witting and unwitting -- are for the future to tell. What we all have now is a sense of adventure and anticipation.

The Robotics Project (the "Hand-Eye Project") evolved within the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory under the guidance of John McCarthy, Les Earnest, Jerry Feldman, and Tom Binford. Major efforts have been undertaken to isolate and solve fundamental problems in computer vision, manipulation, and autonomous vehicles. Generalized cones were introduced for modeling the geometry of 3-dimensional objects, and programs were constructed which learned structural descriptions of objects from laser-ranging data ("structured light"). Stereo vision and texture have been examined. Several generations of robot programming languages have resulted in AL, an intermediate-level language for commanding manipulation. A computer-controlled roving vehicle ("the cart") detected obstacles (using 9-eyed stereo) and planned paths to avoid them.

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Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley

Artificial Intelligence

In IJCAI-81, pp. 67–69.

Massachusetts Institute Technology Press

In IJCAI-81, p. 1064.

Summary of PhD thesis, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, January, 1980,Stanford Rep. Nos. HPP-80-2, STAN-CS-80-784