In the spectrum of what robotics could do for society I see a wide range of truly paradigm shifting applications. These are applications that can change the lives of millions of people. They all require massive improvements in the areas I mentioned in my post. The mechanics are almost academic as is evidenced by the GE walker from 1965 [0]. In terms of mechanical engineering we could do an insanely complex machine back in 1965.
I see no point in creating something as clumsy as Wildcat when what we need are significant improvements in AI. Think of what would be required for a quadruped to be able to climb a rocky terrain like a goat. We can do the mechanics. We could do the mechanics in 1965. What we can't do yet is the reasoning, control and path planning required to complete such a task. We don't need to continue to build a bunch of useless contraptions to advance these fields. We are throwing money at the wrong problems.
I was tackling a subset of your argument initially. If I understand you correctly, what you're saying is that we need to have the core technology first before trying to piece together something out of it first, and any research without that core technology is useless.
I'll expand point by point.
ARTIFICIAL MUSCLES. I wholeheartedly agree that this is a huge point. However, to draw an analogy to civil engineering - cement is important (and is an enabling technology), but it's not required to make advances in architecture.
ENERGY STORAGE. Suspend it by wires for now, limited-mobility robots are useful in some industries.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE + CONTROL SYSTEMS. This was the core of my previous argument. A lot of what someone perceives as "hard AI" problems are actually "hardware-assisted, AI-guided" problems (your example of control and path planning come to mind). In your video, it showed the operator not being able to move the robot fluidly & fluently. This is the aspect that this DARPA initiative is tackling. Separate the AI (human operator for now) from the hardware-assisted aspects. (Please note that humans can typically take over the "hardware-assist" and manually move, but try writing with your non-dominant hand or run in reverse)
PROCESSING / NEURAL COMPUTING. See above.
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES / DEVELOPMENT AND SIMULATION TOOLS. Sure, I agree - but this is a problem that can be tackled right now.
I agree that there are a lot of areas that need to be improved for a "true robot". However, we can improve some subsets right now, and they may be useful in the future.
It's somewhat like arguing that developing advanced image-processing concepts & algorithms was pointless 50 years ago, because neither the software nor the hardware of the time could do anything with the idea. It's quite common in this field that an old algorithm becomes practical due to hardware and software capabilities.
In the spectrum of what robotics could do for society I see a wide range of truly paradigm shifting applications. These are applications that can change the lives of millions of people. They all require massive improvements in the areas I mentioned in my post. The mechanics are almost academic as is evidenced by the GE walker from 1965 [0]. In terms of mechanical engineering we could do an insanely complex machine back in 1965.
I see no point in creating something as clumsy as Wildcat when what we need are significant improvements in AI. Think of what would be required for a quadruped to be able to climb a rocky terrain like a goat. We can do the mechanics. We could do the mechanics in 1965. What we can't do yet is the reasoning, control and path planning required to complete such a task. We don't need to continue to build a bunch of useless contraptions to advance these fields. We are throwing money at the wrong problems.
[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMGCFLEYakM