The science of Star Wars

Last night I caught two of three episodes that were entitled “The Science of Star Wars " on the Discovery channel.  The first episode was on robots and the second was on transportation.  The third episode (which I recorded with the Media Center to watch later) was on the Military.  Basically, all three episodes were about things that were in the Star Wars movies that had an impact on real life, or something that would have seemed like science fiction when Star Wars came out, that is actually in use today. 

Neat things shown on the Robot one was the PSA (Personal Satellite Assistant) and Robonaut from NASA; the Aibo from Sony; and another robot that I can’t recall the name of, but was human height and designed to work with humans for manual labor.  All were very cool (even the Aibo which has been around a while).  The PSA reminded me of the training droid Luke used in the first movie that floated around and shot at him.  The Robonaut’s helmet actually reminded me a great deal of Boba Fett’s helmet.  The other interesting thing about the Robot episode was that it showed a 15 year old kid who was attempting to enter the DARPA Challenge!  This is a autonomous ground vehicle race from LA to Vegas.  The kid programmed his robotic vehicle to avoid obstacles, etc. implementing a nueral net and his own operating system.  This is a seriously smart kid.  He’s up against some of the brightest minds in the country as well.

The transportation episode wasn’t that earth shattering.  They did have some neat things like a sky car, but they rehashed the Mag Lev trains and such.  They did show holographic technology that was pretty cool, but still in development.