There's a great website that I peruse often called Engadget. There's not much to it, they collect and summarize news stories about tech stuff, including about robots. Their schtick for the robot section is that they're trying to warn off the upcoming doom caused by the rise of the machines -- didn'cha see the Terminator movies? Ain't it plain to see that it's comin'? Better treat 'em nice while they're still weak and incapable of dominating us all.

Today I got a firm reminder of just how much power the 'bots on display here have, and just how quickly the reins can be yanked from our hands -- maybe the Engadget schtick isn't such a comedy bit after all. One of the bots, "Tommy" was meekly making its way through the tunnel when it went went stark raving mad. It floored the throttle and kept it there, accelerating out of the tunnel, swerving to miss a stack of tires and finally crashing into the barrier wall at a angle, going somewhere in the range of 45-60 miles per hour. Two people standing one the far side of the wall barely got clear before the 'bot hit it and pushed it inwards by about a meter.

On a more technical level, the people next to me had a good guess as to what had happened -- the inertial navigation system was giving bad or no data, and when the bot lost GPS signal it thought it wasn't moving. It increased the throttle to try to start moving... and increased it some more, and more... confident that it wasn't moving at all as it barrelled towards the wall.

The hardware of a robot senses the world around it -- vision, velocity, position, pressure, whatever. The software tries to mold that data into a coherent and true model of the world around it. When that vision is warped, or when its model is drastically askew, the result isn't what we should call a "bug".

It's lunacy.