When I was in high schools back in the early 70's I had to excuse myself from hanging out with some neighborhood street friends to view a program on science - one of those "what is the future of science & technology" type of shows, & on this program a man had created a robot in humanoid form that could walk. Even though it could do nothing else ( this was 70's technology) I was rather impressed with its ability to navigate & even walk down the street. I do not recall any remote signaling being used or that the humanoid had any kind of vision. From a distance & even up close it looked just like a human & walked in perfect form.
Today here in the 21'st century I am encouraged & enthused with the progress the Japanese have made with Asimo, the Sony robot & others. But I am some what disappointed that it does not walk more upright. It seems difficult to put all of these functions together at once. Within the last 30 years progress with AI has been very slow, but at least today we have a rudimentary form of a robot.
After seeing the show I thought it would be just a few years before we had a functioning robot. Since then I have always predicted that a functioning robot was just around the corner, but have been proven wrong at every turn. However I do believe that with the near term advances in microelectronics we will have a functioning robot by 2010.
Joel