Five robots will be inducted into Carnegie Mellon University‘s Robot Hall of Fame® at a June 21 ceremony during the RoboBusiness Conference and Exposition.
“We decided to give awards to both real and fictional robots because the fictional ones provide inspiration to the real ones,” said James H. Morris, former dean of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. “Now, however, we see that some robots occupy a middle ground. AIBO is real but also entertaining. R2-D2 started off with (actor) Kenny Baker inside but then became automated. Eventually, our deliberations will confront the age-old question of real vs. fiction.”
The inductees include AIBO and David, the android from Spielberg’s A.I. but also:
The not so glamorous SCARA, an industrial robot developed in the 1970s and ’80s. SCARA robots, with shoulder, elbow and wrist joints, are commonly used in pick-and-place assembly and packaging operations. Particularly well-suited for placing circuit boards and mechanical computers in product cases, they have enabled “the inexpensive modern electronics that we now take for granted.”
Maria, who in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis works at the behest of a city’s evil corporate leader to instigate a worker’s revolt. In the process, she not only stole the movie from her human co-stars, but established an image for robotics that would persist for decades. Maria’s art deco design influenced that of C-3P0 in Star Wars.
Gort: in The Day the Earth Stood Still, a film about an interplanetary peace mission to Earth, Gort is a towering robot whose awesome destructive power would be kept at bay only if humans abandoned warfare.

“Gort was a reaction to a world mired in post-Holocaust existential relativism, to belief in definable concepts of ‘good and evil’ and other societal and moral dictums,” said Don Marinelli, director of the Entertainment Technology Center. Gort represented a watershed moment in science fiction ideology. “The proposition that there is an absolute sense of right and wrong, of acceptable and unacceptable, is a political debate that continues to dictate peace and conflict throughout the world today.”
2004’s entry about the Robot Hall of Fame.
Via Robot Gossip. Press release. Images from wikipedia, retrogalaxy, activitaly,