Vote now for Robot Hall of Fame!

See: http://www.robothalloffame.org/

The Robot Hall of Fame was founded in 2003 at Carnegie Mellon University, to honor excellence in robotics technology, both real and fictional.

Robot fans can vote for the finalists in four categories: Education & Consumer, Entertainment, Industrial & Service, and Research.

The site gives a list of previous inductees, which seems to indicate some years got skipped, and in some years there was more than one inducted into entertainment.

Previous Inductees by Year 2008 INDUCTEES

Raibert Hopper | NavLab 5 | LEGO® MINDSTORMS® | Lt. Cmdr. Data

2006 INDUCTEES

AIBO | SCARA | David | Maria | Gort

2004 INDUCTEES

ASIMO | Shakey | ASTRO BOY | Robby, the Robot | C-3PO

2003 INDUCTEES

HAL 9000 | Mars Pathfinder Sojourner Rover | R2-D2 | Unimate

This year there are three nominees in the entertainment category: WALL-E, Rosie the robot from "The Jetsons," and Johnny 5 from "Short Circuit."

I like all of those, and I hope they all get in one year or another.

There are also a number of my favorite robots I'd like to see in the Hall of Fame as well. For brevity's sake I'm going to define "robot" as any mechanical human-shaped construct in movies and fiction after 1921. So the bronze giant Talos from Greek mythology for example, is out.

1921 marks the year Czech playwright Karel Capek adapted the Slavic word for "worker" to mean an artificial life-form in his play "R.U.R" (Rossum's Universal Robots.) Ironically, I'm going to have to exclude Capek's engaging characters because he specified they were biological, not mechanical.

The 2004 inductee Robbie the robot who first appeared in "Forbidden Planet" (1956,) went on to have a career in a number of movies TV episode, and commercials as late as 2006.

I'd like to see "Tobor the Great" (1954) get in some year. I'd also like to see "Adam Link: Robot" from Eando Binder's book, adapted to an episode of "The Outer Limits," and of course Lester Del Rey's "Helen O'Loy" ("of alloy" get it?) as well.

Who's your favorite robot?