The Carnegie-Mellon University Artificial Intelligence Lab
                               meets 
                    `The Ultimate Home Appliance'

                (Reported by Mark Fox and Brian Reid)

 On October  24, 1977, a well-known department store  in the heart of
Pittsburgh advertised the appearance  of a `domestic robot' named Sam
Strugglegear.  Although  this robot is not yet  offered for sale, its
inventor, Anthony Reichelt of Quasar Industries in New Jersey, claims
that   its  powers  include  speech   recognition  with  a  4800-word
vocabulary, sonar-navigated steering, and the ability to do household
chores such  as vacuuming, serving of  drinks, and babysitting.  This
highly-publicized `robot' has been described in Newsweek, Parade, and
other national magazines.

 Knowing  of  CMU's   pioneering  work  in  Artificial  Intelligence,
particularly in the field of speech recognition, various friends have
called CMU  to ask how this  robot might be so  much better at speech
recognition than our talented and dedicated research team.

 Rising to  the challenge, four courageous  members of our department
went downtown to investigate.  They found a frightening sight: in the
men's department,  among the three-piece suits, was  a 5'2'' image of
an aerosol can on wheels, talking animatedly to the crowd.  The robot
seemed  able to  converse on any  subject, to  recognize the physical
features of the customers, and  to move freely (though slowly) in any
direction.   While  the  crowd was  quite  charmed  by  the  talented
machine,  we were  dubious,  and  moved  in to  investigate  it  more
closely.

 The robot  moved on  a set  of wheels;  there were  two large  drive
wheels  about ten inches  in diameter, and  several small stabilizing
wheels:  a mechanism quite similar to the MIT turtle.  It moved about
three inches  per second, approximately one  tenth the normal walking
speed of an  adult.  We saw both arms rotate  at the shoulder along a
horizontal axis.   Although there was a joint at  the elbow, we never
saw it move (perhaps this model had no actuator in the elbow).

 The hands  were like clam-shells in design.  There  was a rod at the
wrist  that could be used  for opening and closing  the hands, but on
the  model we saw, the  hands were actually glued  shut, so that they
could not move even if there were an actuator.  The actuators for the
arms were  electric motors attached to the arms  by gears rather than
belts.  When an arm was blocked while in motion, the motor would stop
dead,  indicating the presence of  some primitive feedback mechanism.
One  patron asked to see  the robot vacuum a  carpet, but was brushed
off with the reply that its batteries were running low.

 The  CMU team  next  set  out  to investigate  the  robot's  sensory
mechanisms.  Pushing  and  blocking its  motion  had no  effect;  the
motors kept  spinning away.   It didn't  seem able  to tell  that  an
object was blocking its  path.  Covering the faceplate did not change
its behavior at all.  Since  the robot seemed able to navigate around
the room without hitting anything,  we found it quite curious that it
had no detectable sensory reactions.

 Feeling more dubious, we  began looking around the room for evidence
of  remote control.  Lo  and behold,  about ten feet  from the robot,
standing in  the crowd, we found  a man in a blue  suit with his hand
held  contemplatively to  his mouth like  Aristotle contemplating the
bust of Homer in the famous Rembrandt painting.  After watching for a
while, we noticed that whenever the robot was talking, the man in the
blue suit could be seen muttering into his hand.  Further seeing that
this man had a wire dangling suspiciously from his waist to his shoe,
one of  the CMU  group screwed  up his  courage and  approached  this
stranger.  "Do many people figure out what you are doing?", we asked.
"No," he  said, "they  are usually  too busy  watching the  robot  to
notice me." "Aha!", we thought  to ourselves, "it looks like we're on
to something here."

 We then asked him what were the robot's speech and vision abilities,
to which he replied that the machine can see about ten inches, dimly,
and that  its speech-understanding  ability was  about 200  words  of
unconnected speech in a quiet environment.

 We didn't really believe his statement of the robot's abilities, and
in the  light  of  our discoveries  of  the robot's  poor  perceptive
skills, we  were convinced  that  there must  be yet  another  remote
control  handling the motion.   Time was running out;  they needed to
move  the machine to  a suburban store for  an evening demonstration.
We returned to CMU feeling unsatisfied.

 When we gave our report to the rest of the lab back at CMU, a second
group of eight immediately  set out to the suburban store, determined
to   find  the  source   of  the  robot's  control.    They  found  a
furtive-looking and rather  disagreeable person loitering in the back
of  the room.  He was  carrying an airline flight  bag, with his hand
stuck  down inside the bag.   We asked him his  business, to which he
replied  that he  was a truck  driver.  He  became extremely agitated
when we asked him what was  in the bag, asking if we were police.  We
dispatched a person to watch  him, in an attempt to find correlations
between movements  of his hand and movements  of the robot, whereupon
he  got very excited  and called for  store officials to  come get us
away from him.  We never did  get to see in the bag.  However, we did
see the man with the microphone say to a store official, "Tell him we
want  to take it for  a walk," whereupon the  store official wandered
over to the `bag man' and whispered something to him.

 It would be  tempting to call this robot a fake,  but it is not.  It
is  a fake  robot, but  a reasonably good  parlor trick,  more in the
domain  of magicians  than of  computer scientists.   However, one is
reminded of  how much better were the parlor  tricks of olden days --
for example,  the chess-playing  robot built  by Baron  Wolfgang  von
Kempelen in 1769.  Spectators were  given a view of the inside of the
robot,  satisfying themselves  that it  could not  possibly contain a
person.   The robot would then  trounce them at chess,  all the while
rolling its  eyes and nodding its head.  The  workings of this famous
`Turk' were  not revealed until 1848, more than  70 years later, when
it  was bought  by  the  Philadelphia Chess  Club  and  disassembled.
Thousands  of people, including  Napoleon and Edgar  Allan Poe, tried
unsuccessfully to  figure out how it worked; very  rarely was it even
beaten.

 Kempelen's description of his own robot, circa 1771, is probably the
best  summary of  Sam Strugglegear:   "A mere  bagatelle, not without
merit in point of  mechanism, but whose effects appear marvelous only
from the  boldness of  conception and  the clever  choice of  methods
adopted for promoting the illusion."