Ask HN: How hard would it be to build a TARS robot? - allenleein
======
sgillen
It depends what exactly you mean. Just building 4 metal beams that connect to
each other and move in some of the ways you see in the movie is doable.

The balance displayed may be accomplished, I suspect a lot of energy would be
needed to drive that system though (im picturing a lot of large and powerful
flywheels, though I'd be curious what other people think could solve the
problem).

The sensing and autonomy of the robot, not to mention the fluidity with which
it moves through the environment, is still several decades off, and probably
much longer.

We'd also need to solve the energy problem, or use some sort tether (not quite
as useful then).

~~~
allenleein
"Say this movie took place 200 years from now -- I’d give it a chance," he
said. "100 years ahead? Maybe. 50 years ahead? I’m a little hesitant to say
TARS and CASE would be at that ability 50 years from now. It’s just not there.
There’s too much to do, and there’s not enough money being put into it to see
that that kind of engineering is going to come forward. It’s all about the
money, you know?"

[http://www.mtv.com/news/1996022/interstellar-tars-
robot/](http://www.mtv.com/news/1996022/interstellar-tars-robot/)

After reading this article, i know it will cost A LOT to build a robot like
TARS, but what about the level of AI of TARS?

~~~
sgillen
I think the AI is the furthest away, though predicting where technologies will
be in 200 years is basically impossible.

IIRC TARS is able to converse with humans naturally (even telling jokes)

navigate about as well as humans in a variety of climates and conditions. From
a controls engineering perspective, This is a lot more difficult that it might
seem

react to emergency situations in an intelligent way (it was able to rescue one
of the humans from an incoming tidal wave and carry them safely to the
spaceship).

I encourage you to check out the DARPA robotics challenge videos. The current
state of the art allows our robots to (very slowly) navigate a controlled,
known environment, and even then most competitors cannot complete the course.

I agree with the articles timeline, I really doubt we'd see something like
TARS in the next 50 years, but 100-200? we'll see.

