This morning’s first keynote address was by Walter Weisel, the Chairman and CEO of Innova Holdings. He started off with a very impressive audio/visual "look back" at robotics. Weisel has been in the industry for over 30 years and worked with Joseph Engleberger, the "father of modern robotics." Weisel showed a b/w video clip of Engelberger in Hollywood demonstrating his robots in front of a live audience – think Lawrence Welk + robots. Weisel promised that the presentation would be online at some point, and I’ll do my best to let y’all know how to get it.

Currently, Weisel’s company, Innova Holdings, is working on a controller and arm to be sent to space to repair the Hubble Space telescope, but NASA isn’t convinced it’s feasable to do it with a robot. Some of the problems involved are, of course, zero gravity, an almost 3 second latency between transmissin, processing, and acknowledgement, and the highly technical aspects of the repairs.