A few days ago, Brown Robotics made headlines around the world for announcing their achieving the long fantasized goal of creating robots that could interact with humans. It's not what you think. The robot, based off of iRobot's PackBot model, can respond to basic gestures that signal for the robot to "follow", "halt", "wait", and "door breach". Throw out your Ridley Scott fantasies and Wall-E dreams because as the video confirms, the manifestation of this scientific breakthrough is more boring than it sounds.

Now, to imagine what the robot could someday do. The paradox of robot invasions at Brown has been a long time coming. (Does the hippie Brown image and the robot warrior thing seem more like paradox or perfection?) Since this particular project received funding from the military and exhibits apparently military-like actions—note the same "halt" gesture seen in Saving Private Ryan—it's not long before it gets cannon arms. This prediction is definitely supported by the fact that the robot does not yet have arms, and it's creepy that way.

Or maybe the new robot can take care of awkward social lives on Ivy League campuses.  Read this:

"We want to foster natural human-robot collaboration in the long term and the kind of interactions that you can get between people," said Loper, who was responsible for creating the gesture-recognition component. "That a person could interact with a robot in the same way that a person can interact with a person."

Yes, you do sir. And ladies, if you're not busy this weekend, Mr. Loper is an idea man. See some pictures of our favorite robots that are much cooler than Brown's after the jump.

Another obvious application of a robot that responds to humans works well with the recent debates on the meaning of the Ivy elite. Imagine how much more obvious it would be to tell the good from the great if the great all had robot slaves. This idea becomes even more obvious on a campus like Harvard or Yale where the students think they're already too privileged to do things like clean their own bathrooms. Forget about paying poor people to do those things. Make the robot slave do it!

In order to encourage further sexual innuendos, here's this quote from one of the project's developers (via Engadget):

The goal, according to Chad Jenkins, is to develop a robot that acts "like a partner. You don't want to puppeteer the robot. You supervise it, 'Here's your job. Now, go do it.'"

Sound an awful lot like graduating and trading in your idealism for wages? It is. What is encouraging in the bigger picture—wherein robots take over the Earth and more Philip K. Dick predictions come true—is that most current students will be graduating just in time. Today, the robots start watching humans and mimicking them. Tomorrow, they're smoking our cigarettes, taking all the good seats in the bar, and totally dominating the Wall Street analyst positions. Stupid computers for brains.

What the Brown Robot does NOT look like:

Wall-E. So evidently, this little Pixar creation has been referenced a lot in talking about Brown's new bot. I can maybe see how the little tank tracks are similar and maybe one of the eyes. Otherwise, no way.

Rosie from The Jetsons. Nope. Too emotional.

Daft Punk. Does the Brown Robot like French House music? We bet yes.

NS-5 from iRobot  Movie. Not enough Will Smith.

Megaman. Not enough arm cannons. No arms at all, in fact.

Replicant. Not enough make-up legs.

The Terminator. This is a true story, right?

PackBot. Bingo. Just enough screws to be expensive. Not enough for anything else.