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The Universal Planar Manipulator
macsox writes: "Wired News has an article about surfaces that, using vibrations, can move objects around at the owner's whim -- for example, using a mouse as a remote desktop arranger. Also envisioned: rooms that redecorate themselves. The scientist's page is here."
I dunno, some of us Linux lovers *are* cute guys...
I dunno, this almost seems like an "obvious patent" type of thing. How many times have you watched something dance around on top of the washing machine, or watch your pager glide across the desktop when set to vibrate mode? While it's sorta neat that this guy is controlling the movements, it's hardly (IMO) all that much of a breakthrough.
The whole thing seems really dumbed-down when they suggest a room that can re-arrange itself. Do people rearrange their rooms SO MUCH, that they would go through the expense of imbedding a bunch of motors in special honeycomb floor?
-This sig intentionally left blank
yep tahts a common misconception about breaking glass and I bet very few people (read less than .00001percent ;p) can break glass.
You have to be able to yell at a certain frequency, and maintain it to get the glass vibrating to the point where it breaks.. NOT easy.
jeremy
Or how about a toy football game where the players run around in a little stadium? Wow, that's modern!
these posts are getting older than the "lets make a beowolf cluster out of these" posts.
except damn near everything.
Notice in the shuffling poker chip video that the speed has been upped by a factor of 2 or 3. This is apparent when looking at the top left corner and seeing someone walk past at the very end. So, what would it take to speed up this process? More amplitude?
This comment is guaranteed*
*not guaranteed
UPS funded some work on a similar concept some years ago. The roller conveyor that resulted had a large number of little casters, all individually steerable. Large conveyor systems have switches to divert objects to various tracks, but this works well only when there's empty space around each box or all boxes are the same size. The idea was to have something that could take in a stream of mixed boxes on a conveyor and separate them. I don't think it got beyond the research stage.
This vibrating idea sounds like it might have potential for applications like that. The substrate could be a flexible solid instead of a mass of wheels, which would prevent jams and simplify cleaning. It might also have applications in airport baggage-handling systems.
PATENT IT!
Now instead of spending their whole day cleaning the house, they can spend the whole day lying on the floor!
The vibrations are low amplitude, Reznik said, and feel like a sound wave.
that looks like it will create a low hum, but it will be very quiet (thats what low amplitude sounds means to the layman isn;t it?)
even if its not audible to people, animals might get mighty pissed at it...
== Perl generally does the right thing, unless you want it to do something else ==
Hey, maybe this technology could be used to reboot a remote Windows box! Now that would be useful.
The potential for improving existing technologies with this is mind-boggling...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
..or we'll all be running around in the streets, being chased by furniture, screaming, "HELP!! CHAIR!! HELP!! CHAIR!!"
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Didn't Homer do this in the episode where the power plant employees were racing to a cabin? There was a bowl on the table. He vibrated the table until the bowl moved off and into his hand.
It's a little more complicated than that. It depends also on the amplitude (and I don't mean in the obvious way), and resonant frequencies of the objects placed on the table. If the amplitude is high enough to cause the object on the table to "bounce", you are going to get a low frequency square wave, i.e. one with many higher frequency harmonics. And, the low frequency wave will add energy to any resonant object you place on it and you will get some transient sympathetic oscillations, though I must say I can't remember the details of this.
Beware the Spanish Inquisition Monty Pythons 'Comfy Chair' will be able to become reality Turn on your reality distortion field now and get ready to say 'Oh no not the comfy chair'
I don't think that's ethically defensible.
Would it be possible to reconfigure the neural net so that it would expect a constant input level, which we could define as "pleasure"? And then the accelerometers could be set up so that they couldn't reduce the input down to anything less than zero.
You'd get the same results, and the neural net would never have to experience anything worse than a vague dissatisfaction.
Thanks in advance!
Or conversely, when someone comes into my office and asks if an earthquake hit, I can finally say "yes"!
And does it last more than five minutes?
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
Actually what I need is a room that will clean itself. Maybe it can be set up to vibrate all the stuff I want to keep into the closet and vibrate the rest into the trash.
Trickster Coyote
Reality is only an illusion.
Ideology is for ideots.
I am wondering - could a few permanent "feet" be attached to the top of the thing, flip it upside down, then you might have this vibrating robot platform-like thing, able to move in any direction (at least on a smooth surface). Imagine - an ultra-cheap holonomic drive (provided you used, say, pager motors, and such to build it).
I guess I am wondering if it would be possible to build such a platform this way, with say three vibrating motors, set @ 120 degrees apart...?
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
OK, obviously an awesome comment...
But wouldn't that be a great demo as well? If the little plastic players ACTUALLY RAN PLAYS? People would throw money at you
As wonderful as such a device would be, there are certian problems inherent to vibratory movement in a mechanical device that are unavoidable. Wear, operating temperature, part size, mass, etc all must be compensated for one way or another. The only place I see such devices remotely practical is in a manufacturing environment where regular tasks are carried out, and such variables can be compensated for by an operator. The only way this could be functional for semi-random objects, although not exactly practical, is through a vision system. However, in order to identify, (and therefor track) an object is to preprogram its shape into the system.
Still, I hope that they get this thing to work. If it can be made to work cheaply and efficiently enough, it would hold great advantages to assembly and manufacturing operations. Perhaps, as mentioned, someday it could clean our desks for us after we go home or perform some other similarly cool task. Also, some people had questions about the noise from such a device. Most vibratory equipment is extremely quiet, since range of motion is controlled electriclly and not by mechanical stops, although rubber stops are sometimes used. Rubber mounts eliminate the remaining noise. A low humm is often all that is heard from this equipment. Good luck to the people working on this, but it's going to be a long road ahead.
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
Something I saw in OMNI magazine many years ago that let you move heavy furniture around a room. It didn't use sound. The floor was made from some kind of flexable plastic, and there were a rather complex series of mechanics under it. They would raise and lower in sequence, so the effect was like a lump popping up that pushed something aside a little, and then another lump pops up, etc. I'm guessing that you would need rather smooth objects, or furniture that had wheels on the bottom for this method to work.
No, honey. It's just the table setting itself.
If the porn industry ever caught on to this...oh man!
"The further I get from the things that I care about, the less I care about how much further away I get." -Robert Smith
Dan Reznik, a Brazilian computer science Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Berkeley, has developed a table with a shaking top that moves objects as if by magic -- the only finger lifted is the one on the mouse controlling what objects are moved where.
Combine this effect with the pressure-sensitive polymer from a few days ago and some control electronics, and you'd have a floor able to react automatically to the presence of a life insurance salesman by wisking him effortlessly back out the door.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
...as I have no time to clean my house. This would be even better than having a house cleaning robot, with an even better wow factor. Of course, I could be wrong, if you get hit by dishes trying to set themselves or something. Could you imagine the chicks when you show them your self cleaning house?
Shit adds up at the bottom...
dnnrly
Since it is using sub-woofer like vibration, will there be a lot of accompanying noise? How heavy of objects can it move? How much damage will the vibrations inflict upon objects which are moved?
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
and what if we put on the table 22 little plastic men, 11 each from two opposing football squads... oh yeah.
not true , read the article: The technology is so precise that it can move individual objects in any direction while leaving other objects exactly as they were. If it's programmaticaly driven, you can play a game for real , instead of on a monitor. Back to classic gaming around the table.
Sorry, this is nothing new, just a different type of application.
--
Vote Homer Simpson for President!
I've looked over the site, but don't recall seeing any mention of just how LOUD this thing would be. If I understand correctly, he's got 4 LARGE voice coils that are rapidly firing in order to get the objects on the surface to move.
This reminds me of the old vibrating surface football game my folks got me when I was a kid. It was pretty noisy then. Hey! Imagine putting appropriate markings on this new surface. With a little creative programming (and, say, bluetooth), we could set up football scrimmages where we nerds would always WIN!
... it could move her emotions from cold to hot in a matter of seconds.
it's in my head
...would be someone at my school hacking into my floor of my apartment as a prank.
To roommate: "Can I borrow your computer? Someone blocked my door with my bed again...."
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Hold the mold, Klunk.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
i think it could be just a case of experimental equipment not being able to handle the more complicated examples all that well.
i hope it isn't a fake, I can't wait to be carried around my house by a floor that gives me a foot massage at the same time
== Perl generally does the right thing, unless you want it to do something else ==
Could you pass the peas, nevermind, I'll just retreive them with my mouse. The ultimate dining experience with a mouse at every seat.
And how do we get geeks to set the table? Build an interface with a Quake engine where you have to deliver certain items to certain parts of the map. Unknowingly, your wife has gotten you to set the table while blasting many things into itty bitty pieces. Life would be good!!!
Tired of sitting at that karma cap? Start a flame war today! See just how low you can go!
How about a computer chess game that moves it's own pieces?
Or Just think what UPS/USPS/FedEx could do with this in a warehouse full of packages?
Mix this technology with that pressure sensitive sensing material, and maybe optical recognition, and it would be able to do damn near anything!
Script kiddies "owning" your dinner table!
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
I looked at the supplied video on the site, and the scale looks, err, funny to me.
Do we know for sure that this thing is real?
Or, said another way, why do the "coins" in the three-coin, figure-eight demo jog around so much when nothing else in the frame seems to move?
Noise was my first concern too. If an object like a table is vibrating strongly enough move a plate around, surely the vibrations must be making sound waves too. At least a low hum. That would get awfully annoying.
No, room, I don't care that the Feng Shui of the room is better that way, I want the TV over *there*!
If I was ever in a bar where a shot of whiskey slowly crawled down the counter to where I was sitting, I'd probably join AA on the spot.
That not only kills people and leaves buildings and structures standing, it tidies up the place a bit.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
Right. A ten thousand dollar table that'll save you the horrible labor of setting the table yourself. Personally, I think some people vastly overvalue the worth of their free time...
- Bachelorhood is the father of necessity.
While IANAP (physicist) there's something here that bothers me a lot. We computeniks often tend to assume the physical world has the nice friction freedom of the virtual machine that executes our C++, Perl or whatever. But this idea moves things around in the physical world where each move will require power from, well, pick a winner, and will throw off a certain amount of waste heat. In this context is it really smart to fling everything in the room repeatedly back and forth in order to relocate one object?
Sorry, I forgot there are ads on the Web; I use Lynx.
Actually there is an entire field of neural network vibration control that started out as adaptive vibration cancellation. In a 1989 demonstration for the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, SAIC had a demonstration where they placed 1, then 2 then 3 accellerometers at various arbitrary places on a 3D grid structure being stimulated by some vibrators similar to those spoken of in the article here. Then the outputs of those accellerometers were fed as "pain" signals to a recurrent neural network that controlled some other vibrators. When the neural network was turned on, the vibrators under its control would vary frequency, phase and amplitude until vibration was cancelled out at precisely the 3 locations at which the accellerometers were placed. You could then pick the accellerometers up and put them back down somewhere else and the neural network would adapt within a few seconds, cancelling out its painful inputs.
Seastead this.
Anita this looks like your first first post.
/. :-P
Once you go to the darkside you can never come back.
hehe, avoid the urge to post to an empty article something totally useless just to get the first post.. hehehe its dangerous ground to walk on, the temptation will overtake you if your new to
Jeremy
I "see" bad things ahead for the blind. The mother of all cruel practical jokes. :-P
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.