Though not called WALL•S by Michael Haupt who posted this blog, the little NXT robot in the picture immediately reminded me of WALL•E. So meet WALL•S, the first robot that actually speaks and understands Smalltalk!
Some of you may know that Smalltalk originally was quite popular in the embedded world. Tektronix for example ran Smalltalk as their software for the oscilloscopes, running entirely in its own universe without an operating system to handicap the power of Smalltalk.
We also know that hardware power has evolved exponentially according to Moore”s Law. It is generally understood that software power does not follow this law at all, lagging behind so much that we still feel our computers are too slow. But few realise that Smalltalk has hardly grown to become slow and unwieldy!
So using Smalltalk as the semantic system of a robot to me feels almost inevitable: of course this should be done! (and, by the way, on the iPhone and GooglePhone as well!). Nice research project by Martin Beck!
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