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All-purpose robots are not, of course, a new idea. “It’s been five or 10 years from happening for about 50 years,” says Eric Berger, co – director of the Personal Robotics Program at Willow Garage, a Silicon Valley organization. The delay is in part because even simple tasks require a huge set of capabilities. For a robot to fetch a mug, for example, it needs to make sense of data gathered by a variety of sensors – laser scanners identifying potential blocking objects, cameras searching for the target, force feedback in the fingers that grasp the mug, and more. Yet Berger and other experts are confident that real progress could be made in the next decade.

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