New Walking Robot From Honda

Jimbob2001 writes: "Forget the Sony AIBO: this new Walking Honda should be the new must have plaything (sorry, not available for sale!). Here's the slick PR Web site (with movies etc.), and here's the developers' site with a little more detail. (Note the P3 is the latest version of this long-standing development project.)"

Comments

Re:vision

[Effugas]

You ask why it's not easy to find stairs.

Among other things, consider the problem with disparity: Looking down gives you horizontal disparity, i.e. the image from one eye is shifted slightly from the image of the other.

Problem is, stairs are horizontally aligned, so there's no "bright line edges" to detect distance from.

Instead, you have to do what the brain does, and search for texture disparity. Good luck; we don't even have compression algorithms that approximate high frequency textures(Perlin Noise isn't hugely flexible nor reversible from real life textures, though I'd wager it could be). To do good binocular disparity on a texture, we need the ability to say, "If the texture was 5 feet away, the two surfaces would differ by x. If the texture was 10 feet away, the two surfaces would differ by y. Now, lets compare these two intrinisically noisy images across multiple texture sizes and detect where in between 5 and 10 feet we are."

Actually, that shouldn't be impossibly different, but it's a hell of alot harder than poking around for a ping pong ball.

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com