Star Wars’ robots don’t reflect reality

Robotics is a smoking-hot industry that’s evolving by literal leaps and bounds, and the top researchers in the field are also some of sci-fi’s geekiest fans.

Robin Murphy, the Raytheon professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University, specializes in artificial intelligence for robotics. As a component of her curriculum, she writes « Science Fiction, Science Fact, » a series of provocative, engaging articles that highlight the myriad differences between the robots and droids depicted in popular science fiction films and the best sci-fi TV shows and actual robots and autonomous machines working in the real world.