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132 Modern Robotics

their retirement years by robotic assistants with nearly human-level
intelligence. Beyond that, Moravec suggests that the most advanced
robots may exceed human intelligence on the same scale that human
intelligence surpasses that of chimpanzees.

At Home with Robots

Hans Moravec was born in the town of Kautzen, Austria, on
November 30, 1948. His father was an electronics technician. In
1953, the family moved to Montreal, Canada, where Moravec spent
most of his childhood.
Moravec built his first robot when he was only 10 years old. It
was built mainly of tin cans, but it was equipped with lights and an
electric motor. In high school, Moravec won prizes for his science
fair entries—including a mobile robot that could follow light sources
and a programmable robot manipulator arm.
In his undergraduate work, Moravec focused on systems for
programming and controlling robots. At the time, computers were
still too large to put inside a robot, and robots had to be controlled
by computer links. Moravec received his bachelor’s degree in math-
ematics from Acadia University in Nova Scotia in 1969.
For his master’s degree (awarded in 1971 by the University
of Western Ontario), Moravec built a minicomputer-controlled
robot that had light and other sensors for responding to the
environment. Moravec’s master’s thesis proposed an extension of
LISP (List Processor), the most widely used artificial intelligence
programming language, which would be better suited for pro-
gramming robots.

Robots à la Carte

In 1971, Moravec moved from Canada to the United States, where
he would spend the decade at Stanford University, one of the top
centers of American robotics research. By 1973, Moravec was heav-
ily involved with the further development of the Stanford Cart, a
remote controlled, wheeled mobile robot that resembled a small