In the manufacturing world, they need a "return on their investment", so the robots that are created perform their tasks required, robots that are necessary. Can't imagine autonomous robots just wondering around trying to figure out what to do on their own , that would be dangerous and scary in a "real life"  scenario.

Even the "terminator" first was programed to perform a particular task  :-(

what kind of robots are these?  watch the  videos - http://ufohastings.com/documentary

I see Justin below just brought us back on topic :-)

DJ!!!  I laughed so much at your comments as you read through these vintage magazines!  Thank you for this....this needs to be a weekly show, no doubt....The DJ and Jer show reading vintage robotics magazines!! 

Ha ha ya Justin! when he wrote in the posting that it was just going to be boring coding as a heads up, I thought well I already bought my Friday night 6 pack,let's see what DJ is up to. So he pulls out the Vintage magazines with Hero 1 on the cover and that peeked my interest right there! Every article in those mags was like Robotics Porn, Ha ha! Very interesting what people were building back then and having the same problems we still have today!

Edit---- And all those robot Arm ads, that one Arm with the Hilarious name and DJ made this comment for Jeremie to use it on himself had me rolling on the floor,That alone made the show worth it!

Oh yes, to Nink, It is truly amazing that high end robots are still not doing much, I am watching a movie right now called Hornet about some High school kids that build a robot that can do more amazing things than anything Boston Dynamics has,including stop Alien invasion on Earth,LOL!! What a stretch! Also to Wil I think that is you,fxrtst? What you did with that Starwars Robot is truly mind blowing stuff since I like all Sci-Fi movie robots! I had a chat with Dennis down at EZ Robot and we were both talking about you and the stuff you are doing, I mentioned I was even wanting to buy your rejected 3d printed parts for that starwars bot,LOL!

I loved reading those robot magazines as kid. I remember trying to build a 6 ft robot from scratch that was better than Hero 1. lol

How far did you get? Lots of time to try again

i didn’t know those existed as a kid. Would have been all over them. My dad kept popular mechanics in the washroom at his company. I must have read the HealthKit hero articles a thousand times over.

In 6th grade I started reading a book called "How to build a self programming robot" by David Heiserman in 1980.  I built the power supply and the base . Heiserman's  design was the size of the Hero Robot, but I wanted to make it 6 feet tall like the Lost in Space Robot B9.   So added a some motorized aluminum legs that had motors for bending. I didn't make it much past this point when I was swept up by the personal computer craze. I studied Electrical Engineering and built mobile robot platforms in College and worked on the Cassini robotic spacecraft and the Mars Sojourner Rover for NASA. Now I teach students how to build robots using Mecanno kits,  Ez-Robot microcontrollers, Raspberry Pis, etc...  I've always meant to get back to that original project one day. Thanks for encouraging  me to do so. BTW, I still have pieces to that original robot in my garage. Glad my parents saved it over all those years.

I am so enjoying this, it brings back so many memories for me! I still have the (only) four Practical Robotics mags that were published. This was a very exciting time for me!

With the Hero robot, I am sure the speech synthesiser was Votrax SC01 by Federal Screw - I actually bought one and it cost me a whole week's wages at the time!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Votrax

Myself and a good friend redesigned Big Trak we called it XTR