Modern robotics

[Humodour]

http://www.ted.com/t..._cooperate.html

 

Fun.

 

There's no way to do justice to this accomplishment with just words. The video covers so many amazing achievements at once I'm left stunned.

Edited June 23, 2012 by Krezack

[Gorgon]

Very cool

[Lexx]

Pretty cool how they are generating the 3d map of their enviroment.

[Gorgon]

The fancy manouvering is all done in GPS though. The drones know where everything is in d3 space updated 100 times a second. That can't be replicated outside the lab, it would take too much onboard computing.

[Humodour]

The fancy manouvering is all done in GPS though. The drones know where everything is in d3 space updated 100 times a second. That can't be replicated outside the lab, it would take too much onboard computing.

 

That's not correct. The drones do NOT know where everything is via GPS. That makes no sense - they can only know where THEY are via GPS. The drones have sensors (I'd guess ultrasonic rangefinders and EMR sensors such as cameras and lasers + laser detectors) which they use to map out their environment. They do not use GPS to map out their environment.

 

Be careful what you claim about modern computing power, too. It's is trivially easy to cheaply supply gigahertz of computing power with low current draw and on a low voltage these days - I know, as I make hobby projects with some ARM chips. I doubt it would take too much processing power at all to loop through a small function which performs collision detection and avoidance 100 times per second (remember that 100 times per second is glacially slow to a processor that can execute hundreds of millions of instructions per second).

 

To reiterate: the fancy manoeuvring (such as flying through hoops) did NOT use GPS. It used cameras (light sensors). GPS cannot help you with collision avoidance.

 

In fact if you skip to time 12:15, he specifically states that the robots are capable of navigating through unknown terrain in real-time without GPS access, and he shows you footage of them doing just that.

[Gorgon]

Ok, but the cameras were not mounted on the drones.

[Humodour]

Ok, but the cameras were not mounted on the drones.

 

Fair enough for the fanciest manoeuvres, but at time 12:00 he does demonstrate the robot manoeuvring the real world with a camera and a laser rangefinder.

 

I guess your point was that currently the robots can't perform the fanciest manoeuvres outside a motion capture system. Fair enough.

[Tigranes]

Not seen the video yet, but in Paris my friend had one of those vacuum cleaners that go around cleaning the room on their own, automatically avoiding all obstacles with ease... except their own cable.

 

fun times.

[Lexx]

I thought about buying such a thing. But they only use filters for the dirt and stuff they are absorbing. So sooner or later you will have to fiddle *a lot* with the damn filters and probably buy new ones in regular timeframes, which will cost you a ton of money in the longer run.

 

As cool as these cleaning robots are, in my opinion, it's not more than an expensive toy right now.

[Morgoth]

As cool as these cleaning robots are, in my opinion, it's not more than an expensive toy right now.

Exactly. The ultimate goal to create replicates will never come to fruition, since it's just too goddamn expensive (not just the material, also the AI).

 

It would be more feasible and cheaper if instead we just manipulate our own genetics to become enhanced Human beings.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqTzQaTCrMM