On a crisp october day last year, Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute kicked off its 25th-anniversary celebration, as the world's robotics experts came to Pittsburgh to see C-3PO, Shakey the robot, Honda's Asimo, and Astro Boy inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame. The next day saw demonstrations of running, snaking, and bagpipe-playing bots. On the third day, it was Mitsuo Kawato's turn to speak. The lights went down, and the director of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, made his way to the stage to the beat of rock music.

Despite such a welcome, Kawato is an outsider here, dismissive of the self-congratulation that creeps into conversations about modern robotics. He begins his presentation by shuffling slowly across the stage, imitating how stiffly and deliberately today's humanoid robots walk. What this suggests, he says, is that scientists don't really understand how the human brain controls the body. If they did, they could re-create the process in a robot. Indeed, Kawato doesn't talk about improving robot vision or navigational controls, as many other speakers at the gala do. Instead, he describes the role of brain regions such as the cerebellum and basal ganglia in the acquisition of motor skills, carefully couching his explanations in terms that roboticists understand.