AI milestones in 2002
3 documented milestones from 2002.
iRobot Roomba Launch
In September 2002, iRobot Corporation released the Roomba, a disc-shaped autonomous vacuum cleaner priced at USD 199. The product demonstrated that a reactive, behaviour-based robot could navigate unstructured domestic environments without maps, bringing autonomous robotics into mainstream consumer households.
Structured Light for Robust Correspondence in Active Stereo Vision
In 2002, Li Zhang, Brian Curless, and Steven M. Seitz at the University of Washington presented a method using structured light patterns projected onto scenes to establish robust stereo correspondences, enabling reliable 3D reconstruction under conditions where passive stereo fails.
Torch Machine Learning Library
In 2002, Ronan Collobert, Samy Bengio, and Johnny Mariéthoz at IDIAP Research Institute published a paper introducing Torch, a modular C++ and Lua-scriptable machine learning library that unified a range of algorithms, including support vector machines and neural networks, under a common object-oriented framework.