Humans do it, chimps do it, elephants do it, heck even crows do it. Use tools, I mean. And now, thanks to Mike Stilman at the Georgia Institute of Technology, robots may soon use tools as well:
“Our goal is to develop a robot that behaves like MacGyver, the television character from the 1980s who solved complex problems and escaped dangerous situations by using everyday objects and materials he found at hand,” said Stilman, an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. “We want to understand the basic cognitive processes that allow humans to take advantage of arbitrary objects in their environments as tools. We will achieve this by designing algorithms for robots that make tasks that are impossible for a robot alone possible for a robot with tools.”
Well, that's a tall order since this is all MacGyver ever needs, but still you have to admit that it'd be pretty nifty to see MacGyverbots: Link