ple, a coffee cup. The robot first inspects a picture of the cup. The robot then excludes from the picture things not necessary for identifying the cup, such as a sugar bowl. This cleans up the image and makes a black silhouette of the cup on a white background. Next the robot estimates how the cup appears at different scales and rotations. Then the robot conducts its search, looking for objects with the same shape until it finds a match. The technology still needs some improvements as the robot cannot tell the difference between a laptop and a neatly folded black turtleneck. The software has no way of distinguishing between metal and fabric. The engineers are working on developing texture maps so robots will have the ability to make that type of distinction. Engineers want to incorporate other senses as well. A touch map is also being considered, but engineers are not sure how this could be done.
             Eventually the engineers hope to be able to put robots into situations requiring the robot to quickly process and respond to multiple stimuli. A crowded street is a good example of the environment they would like the robot to be able to navigate in.
             Tiny wireless identification tags are soon going to be seen everywhere throughout our daily lives. E-ZPass transponders and several Swatch watches already carry identification tags. These tags are known as RFID tags which stands for Radio Frequency Identification. Each time the tag is hit by a radio beam at the right frequency it sends out its unique serial number. Homes, foods and even clothes might all have such tags built into them in the future.
             Some tags can and may be read without your permission or knowledge. Last November Texas Instruments (a software company) and the Gap announced they had completed a three month test in which every piece of denim in a store in Atlanta received a wireless identification tag. Texas Instruments boasts having the ability to track clothing...