Thanks for the reply. The Terregator was historic in its own way -- as perhaps the first robust outdoors-oriented general-purpose wheeled flexible mobile testbed with an AC gasoline-powered generator capable of supporting a significant computer with an onboard interactive terminal. I remember walking behind the Terregator with Red's brother Chuck and others in Schenley park as people tested road-following (well, park-path-following) algorithms. It was cool to see on the terminal display what the robot thought it was seeing in real-time. And it was nice to be outside in good weather. If you made that or worked on it, kudos to you! Terregator was a key innovative step forward as a platform that made possible other follow-on work like for Alvan (all leading up to self-driving cars). Well, when it wasn't trying to drive up trees -- which is what an emergency stop is for. :-)
But yeah to learn it was fork-lifted into place, sigh. I also have my own personal (essentially now non-functional) robotics projects from back then and before squirreled away in a storage area, with bittersweet feelings as I look at them now and then in passing when looking for other things.
Somehow I wonder if -- beside the general issue of becoming middle aged and wistfully looking backwards at past artifacts and past times -- if there is perhaps a certain disappointment that robots today are not that much better in the main that back in the 1980s? Even the video from Boston Dynamics for all its awesomeness doesn't actually show legged robots doing anything useful. We still don't have robots as capable or general purpose as B9 from Lost in Space or the walking drones from Silent Running appeared to be when on the screen (even if in real life they were human-operated fakes). Show me Spot folding laundry (like WG's PR2 could do, if slowly) and I might be more impressed.
Robotics was also so expensive to work on in the 1980s -- plus also the AI winter happened -- which all probably contributed to many people with robotics aspirations (like me, especially to do stuff like this: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/ ) instead moving into software-only work, working on programs generally about other things than robots.
Robotics is such a different space today though for a new generation with cheap sensors, Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, reliable WiFi, cheap laptops, cheap platforms, disused old Roombas, and so on... I remember in the 1980s how excited Hans Moravec was of the special (and expensive) "Swedish wheels" he had gotten for a new robot being built (Uranus, an unfortunate name for anything, sadly) which provided sideways mobility without computational complexity -- and now I see those wheels on robot toys.
It's kind of surprising though when I think about that how relatively little progress towards useful activities there has been by hobbyists and even professionals given all that personally affordable potential compared to what one might have expected in the 1980s if we has just had more cheap hardware? Still there is FarmBot, ShopBot, 3D printing, cheaper CNC machines, flying inspection drones, robotic surgical systems, easily configurable commercial vision systems for parts inspection, and probably many other useful things. Even somewhat-self-driving cars that don't kill that many people. But somehow I might have expected more a third of a century later?
To be clear, I am talking about crossing some gap between playing with or learning about mechanisms (like FIRST robotics or Girls of Steel, which seem like genuinely useful educational programs) and actually creating something useful and reliable day-in-day out like a dishwasher, or robot vacuum that deals with pet hair, or window curtain closer, or plant waterer, or robot chef, or reliable Lego sorter or whatever. Or ideally one device that can do all of those things.
Willow Garage was a promising (if pricey, with PR2) endeavor in that direction. Sad that it got disbanded. The open source aspect (including ROS) though was another innovation that was good to see.
Perhaps like it has been said that AI is that which computers can't do reliably yet (e.g. winning at chess is not longer considered AI the way it was in the 1980s at CMU with Hans Berliner), maybe robotics is that which mechanisms can't do reliably yet? :-) So maybe the vacuuming and mopping robots we have at home don't emotionally seem to count as robotics? And neither does Subaru's EyeSight emergency braking or similar driver assistance technology of other car makers?
Or maybe there is some robotics equivalent of Moravec's observation that decade after decade of researchers from the 1950s on through the 1990s were stuck at 1 MIPS as budgets kept decreasing and researchers kept increasing -- until eventually researchers could move beyond 1 MIPS when hardware crossed some price/performance threshold?
Or perhaps that is an example of Roy Amara's law that "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." Maybe we are on the cusp of hobbyist and university lab breakthroughs driven by falling costs opening things up to more tinkering?
The bottom line for flexible robots with manipulators is they seem to require force-torque sensors and touch sensors and flexible vision processing (with high CPU requirements). Demos of advanced manipulators like a "High-Speed Robot Hand" by Ishikawa Oku from The University of Tokyo aside, or the promising Baxter by Rethink Robotics aside (now defunct, sadly), it sees like robots with flexible manipulators are still not quite there yet -- even if Boston Dynamics and even Tesla show that computer-controlled mobility by itself is increasingly essentially a solved problem (assuming batteries continue to improve).
Or maybe I am just so far out of the robotics loop as this point that I have not heard of more amazing stuff going on for manipulation and vision? Even though I see new things now and then, the last time I looked around a lot at robotics progress was perhaps ten years ago, when I was working on this essay: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Or maybe, as with Moravec's paradox of higher-level thinking requiring less computation than low-level hand-eye coordination, maybe some key aspects of robotics like object manipulation in unstructured environments remain hard problems?