Robotics and artificial intelligence are so indissolubly wedded that I haven't tried to separate them. The picture on the right shows the experimental Eureka automatic carpet sweeper.
After decades of hype, computer technology has finally reached the launching ramp. Robotics and omputer vision requires computational speeds measured in gigops to reach merely reptilian levels of intelligence. This has just become available and the 2003-2005 era is now targeted for the first visually navigated robotic devices.
The paper "Our 4-Dimensional Universe" represents an attempt to present special relativity intuitively to high school students in terms of what it is: four-dimensional geometry. Fortunately, only two dimensions are required to see and understand rotations of the t (time) axis about the x (spatial) axis. The treatment of general relativity derives the Schwarzchild solution for a planet moving around its primary without using tensors, although it does evaluate the off-diagonal elements of the metric tensor. This writeup needs to be redone, and, hopefully, simplified somewhat further, but it's still quite a bit simpler than the simplest tensor derivations of which I'm aware.
In September, 1976, six months before the first true personal computers, the TRS-80 and the Commodore Personal Electronic Translator 2001, were introduced in March , 1977. I published the (included) paper "Personal Computing - A New Home Brew for You?". It predicts the future of personal computing through the year 1981. Then in 1979, I updated it with a forecast through the year 2000. And in 1991, I updated the update with a forecast through the year 2040. And finally, in 1997, and again this year, I have refined these earlier forecasts and projected them through the year 2012. To find out how well or poorly I did, just click on the above.