Hans Moravec

Austrian-born roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. His Stanford doctoral work on the Stanford Cart (completed 1980) produced one of the first mobile robotsmobile robot, n.: A robot that travels around by itself — on wheels, tracks, legs, propellers or thrusters — such as a robot vacuum, warehouse cart, delivery robot or planetary rover. to find its way around obstacles using stereo vision, and at Carnegie Mellon he developed occupancy grids with Alberto Elfes (mid-1980s), a probabilistic map representation still used in robot mapping. In 'Mind Children' (1988) he set out what became known as Moravec's paradoxMoravec's paradox, n.: The observation that what is hard for people, like chess or algebra, is often easy for computers, while what toddlers do effortlessly, such as seeing, walking and picking things up, is very hard for machines.: the abilities people find hardest, such as formal reasoning, take a computer little computation, while seeing and moving, polished by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, take a great deal. He estimated the brain's processing power by extrapolating from the retina and projected when affordable computers would match it, an early compute-based forecast that anticipated later biological anchorsbiological anchors, n.: A way of forecasting when AI could transform the world, by estimating how much computing it would take to match the human brain and when that much computing would be affordable. analyses. 'Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind' (1999) predicted robots overtaking humans. He co-founded Seegrid (2003), which makes autonomous warehouse vehicles.