1970 – “BERT” – Sam Newhouse (American)

see full pdf here. Personal Computing FEBRUARY 1978 p56-61 BERT (excerpt) Building Your BASIC Robot Robots vary in sophistication and control structure, from Mars-walking space probes and industrial assembly robots to self-motivating household pets and computer-controlled "turtle" drawing robots. My interest in these simple mobile computer input-output devices, robots, led me to construct my own …

1970 – “MERV” – Peter Vogel (Australian)

Meet MERV – Electronics Today (Australia) April 1971 MERV stands for Mobile Environmental Response Vehicle. Its creator, Peter Vogel, built it to demonstrate his theory on artificial intelligence IS it true that machines are incapable of intelligence, or can they in fact be endowed with reasoning power?' One answer — in the form of an …

1964 – “ROBUG” – Hans Moravec (Austrian / Canadian)

ROBUG: switch-programmable to wake/seek/avoid on light/touch/wind; feelers charged to 90 volts! "In high school [Montreal,1964] he [Hans Moravec] won two science fair prizes for a light-following electronic turtle and a tape-controlled robot hand. As an undergraduate he designed a computer to control fancier robots, and experimented with learning and automatic programming on commercial machines. During his …