In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:

Bradley K. Sherman wrote:

They can't even make a robot that can get the butter out
of the refrigerator, the bread out of the toaster, and
spread the former on the latter. Give me a call when
they get that far and we'll talk about autonomous robots
for multi-decade space exploration.

And the problem here is that you are using machines to interface food
with a person in the way you'd expect it to be done, so that the
buttered slice of toasted bread will show up on your plate.
From a nutritional point of view, grind the bread up into bits, toast
it, mix it with the butter, and exude it through a tube as a paste. That
could be easily done by machinery alone and wouldn't need any computing
power at all.

There are reasons why food-in-a-tube isn't getting as much attention as
it did in the early space program era. Yeah, you can get the bare
nutritional requirements that way, but people get tired of it really
fast.

We keep trying to make robots that walk around on legs like people,

And are getting better at them.

even though we don't use mechanical legs on our vehicles, but rather rely on
wheels or treads.

Because they're a *lot* simpler to make.

How many biological organisms use wheels for movement? Other than some
microorganisms?

A legged planetary exploration robot may look neat,
but I doubt it's going to be able to go cross-country at 30 mph like a
M1 tank can. :-)

IIRC, it's 45mph, until the crew rips out the governor and gets going.

Actually, as long as you don't require high speed, leg-based machines
would be able to go places that tracked and wheeled vehicles can't go at
all, or only with great difficulty.

I recall seeing a writeup of a new-ish leg-thing in development
specifically to deal with terrain that isn't suited for wheel/track
vehicles. It wouldn't replace wheels, certainly, but it could supplement
them for some environments.