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.

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