Inside robotics at X

Pop culture created our love affair with robots; thanks to movies, TV and media going back to the 1950s and 1960s, millions of us are waiting for our own friendly bipedal humanoid. Perhaps you think that only when our laundry is automatically folded and dishwasher loaded, “the future” will have arrived. But these strong pop culture notions of what a robot is have had an unintended side effect: we often misunderstand what robots really are. “Building cool robot technology” is not an end in itself; instead, robots are tools that we can put to work to extend humanity’s capabilities.