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98 Modern Robotics

was marketing products such as a highly interactive baby doll, the
Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, and tracked robots for use in the
military and law enforcement.
Meanwhile, at MIT, Brooks and the AI Lab are working on
Project Oxygen, an effort to make computers pervasive and respon-
sive. Examples include voice control, screens that are also walls of
rooms, and the seamless connection of telephone and Web services.
The ultimate goal is to have all the power of computers available at
a word or a touch wherever people are and whatever they are doing,
alone or together.

What Distinguishes Life?

Brooks has not abandoned his quest to use robots to help humans
understand how they came to be intelligent. Nevertheless, he has
expressed dissatisfaction with the common attempts to apply com-
putation theory to the understanding of biology. It is not that he is
seeking some mystical “vital essence,” but rather, as he said in the
article “The Deep Question”:

We need a conceptual framework that gives us a different way of
thinking about the stuff that’s there. . . . We see the biological sys-
tems, we see how they operate, but we don’t have the right explanato-
ry modes to explain what’s going on and therefore we can’t reproduce
all these sorts of biological processes. That to me right now is the
deep question. The bad news is that it may not have an answer.

Despite the remarkable achievements of robots such as Brooks’s
Cog and the work of his innovative student Cynthia Breazeal with
the “empathic” robot Kismet, there is still an intuitively recognized
difference between robots and animals (including people). In his
Nature article “The Relationship between Matter and Life,” Brooks
compared the efforts of two related fields. Artificial intelligence
has focused on modeling perception, cognition, and behavior. On
the other hand, artificial life has concentrated on creating simple
entities that simulate reproduction, selection, and evolution. Both