So many areas of business, entertainment, and sports have a Hall of Fame. Did you know there’s even a Robot Hall of Fame? There has been since 2003. It’s the brainchild of those prodigious crania over at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. The 2006 Inductees have just been announced. They are (…the envelope please): Maria , the art deco fembot from Fritz Lang’s landmark 1927 film “Metropolis,” Gort, the big-boned bot from 1951’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” David, the droid that sees dead people, from Spielberg’s/Kubrick’s “Artificial Intelligence: AI,” the Sony AIBO robo-pet, and SCARA (Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm), the increasingly ubiquitous industrial robot. Previous Hall of Famers include Mars Pathfinder, ASIMO, R2-D2, and C-3PO.
The RHF has the two categories “Robots from Science Fiction” and “Robots from Science” to celebrate the robots that inspire us and those we create as a result of that inspiration. The new bots will officially be welcomed into the Hall during a ceremony this June. No word yet on what Maria Metropolis will be wearing, but we think she’d look stunning in anything from the DigiKey catalog.