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A Robot To Follow "Mother" And Another To Block Her
fireflash writes: "Some folks at MIT have had a bit of fun with robots. 'Mr. Mallard' and 'Roboguard' are robots that follow a homing beacon and guard hallways, respectively. Wouldn't you like to be followed around by a mess of wires and boards whilst attempting to pass through a hallway guarded by another? Sounds like the ultimate in home security to me :-)."
I got an early post? Perhaps first?
Oh well, back to dowloading pr0n...
Pr0n K1ng
Nothing to see here, move along...
Of course, there's the "state-sanctioned" version of how Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda got his most peculiar nickname ("'CmdrTaco' is a reference to a Dave Barry article where he lists places not to take a date. Among them is any place called 'The Commander Taco' or something like that.") and then there's the real reason for said nickname.
In order to explain it, we'll need to hop into the time machine and step back a few years to when Mr. Malda was still but a wee pup in college. So I'd like to take you back to the early 90's.
Rob was fresh out of Catholic high school, with dozens of years of Catholic guilt impressed upon and built up inside him. He'd snored his way through high school, tinkering around with nothing more than computers. Fact of the matter is that most girls don't like geeks and he was too repressed to figure out a way to approach those of the fairer sex. For that matter, he was even afraid to touch himself. Based on what little sex ed had been taught in school, he knew better than to engage in premarital copulation or let his seed touch the ground, lest he burn in hell or suffer the fate of Onan. It wasn't the bullying and the scornful glances that were the worst torture of high school, it was waking up in the middle of the night, his genitals throbbing, gritting his teeth, and clenching his perineum to abate the oncoming rush of verboten relief (after his mom found his stained underwear once, he had learned better).
But college represented the ultimate to a scrawny kid who wasn't quite sure how to play well with others. It was the chance to meet completely new people and to completely reinvent himself, a rebirth of sorts. And what kind of rebirth would it be? The kind that meant he would (finally) get chicks. Catholic guilt be damned! He'd heard that throbbing in his loins loud and clear and it was finally time to do something about it. But how? The answer was clear: in addition to the obvious major in computer science, he'd pick up a minor in art. Women would look at him and see not only the provider instincts that comp sci implied, but a sensitive heart and a mind with a flair for aesthetics as well, a heart with art in it. What lady could possibly resist such a formidable combination?
Unfortunately, all of them. A little scribble on paper saying you know art is no replacement for the ability to clearly communicate that you love it as he was finding out. Things at college were no different than in high school. The girls were still hung up on the football players, leaving him struggling to make a saving throw vs. pathetic geekdom. He discovered the concept of alcohol, figuring that cracking a sixer and his inhibitions meant that he'd be cracking their legs, but again, he turned into nothing but an incoherent mess.
A year went by and no luck, aside from ridding himself of some Catholic guilt: the liberal nature of campus and the wonders of the nascent world wide web meant that with a little (very little) peer interaction skirting around the subject and lonely hours in the dead of night on weekends when his roommates were out presumably dipping their wicks meant that he'd finally been able to overcome his irrational fear of masturbation. And boy, did he ever.
Saying that he took to it like a fish to water was an understatement: he masturbated as if he honestly believed that if he did it enough, he'd win a prize. Unfortunately discovering Usenet, he learned all manner of deviant masturbatory practices, of course convincing himself that it was all OK and that this was just practice for when he finally met Ms. Right, etc., etc. You can justify some things to yourself, but there shouldn't be any way to rationally justify getting your penis lodged in a beaker. Stupid stupid! What was he thinking? But the guy on alt.sex.masturbation had said that the sensation of a penis displacing a beaker full of warm olive oil was the most "realistic" feeling ever, so who was he to doubt? It was a heart pounding few minutes waiting to return to his normal, pitifully small flaccid state, hoping that his roommate wouldn't return to find him in such a grotesque state. His roommate was, of course, aware that Rob was wacking it like it was going out of style, but while that was mildly normal, there was something horribly wrong about having your member painfully lodged in a glass beaker. But things there all worked out and the beaker replaced his normal jitrag "hidden" underneath his bed. He even jokingly contemplated submitting the beaker half-full of swirled olive oil and rank seed as an art project, but thankfully thought better of it.
This was all foreplay to what would give him his nickname forever. Perusing alt.sex.masturbation after he'd mauled himself one afternoon while his roommate was still out, he came upon a life-changing post: the most realistic sex sensation, ever, guaranteed. Dozens of replies to the post over the next few days verifying that this was indeed the best thing since sliced bread assuaged his fears that this would turn into another Beaker Incident. So for the first time ever, Rob set out to the hardware store. Having picked up a small length of modestly gauged PVC piping, it was off to the supermarket to procure some liver.
When he burst back into his room, rosy-cheeked and visibly excited, his roommate and a few of his friends began to cruelly inquire about why he had some piping and liver. Malda, somewhere between stutter and a mumble, blurted out some half-assed explaination about "Maxwell's Demon" and "passive heating". They laughed and headed on out to "throw some brews back and nail some broads". Malda waited the longest five minutes of his life until he was convinced that they were gone, then snuck down to the microwave to heat up the liver for the longest 45 seconds of his life. Sprinting with the foul organ in tow back to his room, he stuffed the liver into the PVC pipe and then stuffed his foul organ inside of it. So amazing was the sensation that it provided that he copulated with the homebrewed artificial vagina multiple four more times that evening, finally passing out with the semen-laced liver-stuffed pipe leaking all manner of horrible fluids leaking onto his sheets. With a start, he woke in the middle of the night, scrambling furiously to hide the pipe, dispose of the pearly mistake-covered liver, and then wash his sheets. His roommate and his friends stumbled in while he was washing the sheets, and they cruelly inquired if he'd shat the bed or what. He responded that he'd had a bit too much to drink and had puked on it. They gave each other knowing glances, shoved him aside and went back to their respective rooms.
So Malda's love affair with a pipe and some liver continued unabated, and things were going well: in one of his art classes, he'd even managed to tell a (not even remotely attractive) girl that he was a comp sci major and an art minor, and was patting himself on the back for a job well done. He returned to his room high on life and ready for a few rounds with the liverpipe, and so thought nothing of it when his roommate invited him over to dinner at his friend's place. He accepted, thrusted to fruition in his unholy contraption, cleaned up after himself and then took a shower and a nap before getting up to head to dinner over at his roommate's friend's house.
He showed up at six prompt, and they began by cracking open a few Coronas and watching some TV. It was Mexican night, they informed him. Nachos and tacos: what would he like? Tacos, he responded.
At the dinner table (OK, huddled around the TV), Malda was talking with excitement in his voice about how he'd unearthed some of his old disks with shareware classics like Duke Nuke 'Em, Jumpman, Tapper and Commander Keen on them and had been playing them all afternoon. One of the guys snickered and he asked if they weren't into old games.
"*snicker* Hey, uh. Guys. Do these tacos taste a little funky to you?"
"*snicker* Yeah, a little bit."
Rob looked around, not quite getting the gist of it and responded "These taste fine. Why?"
As his roommate burst out laughing, one of the guys said "Yeah. I sort of... ran out of meat and I had to make your tacos with this piece of meat I found in the garbage near your roommate's room. But don't worry. It was all wrapped up and so it wasn't dirty... COMMANDER TACO!!"
It was then, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, that he realized that he'd been fed a piece of liver that he'd been intimate with only hours before. He ran out of the apartment crying and failed his classes for the rest of the semester, getting enough counseling and living in enough denial afterwords that he managed to graduate in 4 1/2 years like a real trooper.
So why would he choose such an embarassing nickname for a website he decided to run shortly thereafter, you ask? Who knows? Brainfart, Freudian slip, self-deprecation, therapy, anybody's guess, really. On the bright side, it's one less question that those pesky reporters will have to ask him about the meaning behind his name, right?
I don't mean to be cruel, but I really don't think Roboguard is going to be keeping me from going anywhere. Just one swift kick and I'd be adding a few extra Legos to my collection.
And next you tell us that the robots run MIT/Cesium 4.02. Somehow I lost confidence in MIT :-)
karma capped
This is probably going to be needed real soon.. google mirror
visit my free wallpaper collection, wp.erasei.com
(or insert 'Berserk' or 'Robotron/Llamatron' to your heart's desire... :-)
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
"THE actor Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock in Star Trek, has admitted that his role as the Starship Enterprise's straight-laced Vulcan with two hearts and no emotions, led him to alcohol addiction."
An even more interesting robot is the one at CMU that walks around talking to people & showing facial expressions... these roboguard robots don't seem all that advanced, especially after seeing robot museum guides, nurses, and lots of other cool robots.
Is this project:
cute? yes.
worth an A as a class project? yes.
Breakthrough? no.
Research? no.
New? no.
News? no.
-r
And on Halloween the one which follows you around keeps muttering "...lameness filter encountered, must remove lameness..."
but this project is incorporating wireless ethernet system into it...
--- I never lie when I have sand in my shoes.
I am already imagining some practical applications for this. Kind of fits well with that robotic cat(dog?) that was released in Japan not too long ago. Though if I was gonna use it for a robotic pet, I wouldn't use legos, I'd hack something togather with a stuffed tux and use red LED's for eyes. Now thats home protection! =P
Can all fish swim?
Deny the ball.
[BeeDeeBeeDeeBeeDee]
Deny the ball.
[BeeDeeBeeDeeBeeDee]
Exception Handler: Baseline run around attact detected! Side-Shuffle init.
....
Blarf.
I just got a copy of OS X and decided to try out OmniWeb as my browser. And I've got to say it: Holy shit is this a nice browser. Everything looks fan-freaking-tastic. The buttons use the aqua buttons and the text is absolutely gorgeous. Even Slashdot looks good with smooth text. To any of you OS X users using Mozilla or IE - go try OmniWeb NOW!
I imagine if these things could be made much smaller, and consume less power, then they could be ideal to use as battlefield spies. Simply strap a cheap webcam on the top, add a cheap PC and an 802.11b network card and away you go!
Yeah, ashtray called dog, its a robot that comes when it needs to. It works for the man that created the ash tray, so its a cool robot. But it lacks a sense of feeling, but well, it has taste.
Growing Trend in Peer-to-Peer Girlfriends
Stamford, CT - Internet consulting firm Gartner Group predicts that growth in peer-to-peer girlfriends will explode in the coming months. "Right now the P2P girlfriends are in the hands of early adopters in the tech community. We think that by the end of the year they will have reached critical mass and move into the mainstream. We forecast that by 2003, 65% of girlfriends will be peer-to-peer," said consultant Dawn Haisley.
One of the first movers was Computer Science student Neil Joseph, "I was pretty pissed when she told me she slept with someone else, but when I found out she was one of the new peer-to-peer girlfriends I was geeked. I love being a beta-tester. My friends are telling me I should leave her, but I know they are just jealous."
The beauty of a peer-to-peer girlfriend is that one peer doesn't know what the other peer is doing. Anonymity is extremely important in maintaining the integrity the network. Most girlfriends report that the speed between peers is more satisfying in a local network, but anonymity is easier to keep in a world wide network.
Some techies aren't pleased with P2P girlfriends. "These consultants throw around terms like peer-to-peer and they don't even know what the phrase means," said networking guru Mitch Mead, "P2P girlfriends aren't even a true peer-to-peer network. They are just a client-server model trying to jump on the P2P bandwagon."
Tom Mansfield agrees, "I had a so-called P2P girlfriend, but she was more like a lyin', cheatin' slut."
I am the pusher robot. Please go stand by the stairs so that I can protect you.
end communication
They should stick 'em into Robot Wars (after arming it with a little more than some lego bricks. It'll be cool, a mix of Robojox[1] and Combat Zone[2]).
[1] An OLD film, does anyone else remember it?
[2] An OLD computer game (Win 3.11), does anyone else remember it?
CS!
Insightful but Overrated Troll
This project apparently takes place at MIT, but each picture showed an attractive young female, for a total of two attractive young females!
After 11 years on the software field, I know attractive young females are only about 5% of the software population (even counting testers), so this whole thing sounds like a Halloween prank.
The shover robot pushes people around, and the pusher robot shoves bread down their throats.
Are there stairs in your house?I used to be a cynic, then I got disillusioned with it.
Is one Pusher robot, the other Shover robot? Just what are they trying to protect us from anyway? http://www.jonathonrobinson.com/secret.htm
It would be very complicated to make a robot for the battlefield that obeys Asimov's laws.
The zeroth law does allow them to kill people to save other people, but for modern battles you're gonna have to teach them religon to get them to kill some people.
"The entertainment of the many outweighs the safty of the few, or the one"
M@
Krispy Cream is people
Holy crap, that Roboguard demo is... 173MB? Maybe they should put a size warning on that one, although my work's currently paying for my bandwidth, meh.
shut up man
I'll take two, with the optional mild electrical stimulation/motivation modules, please. :-)
How about data compression? A three min video clip that is 177 megs? This better be good.
And don't even think about master / slave.
In fact, we'll help you get your own relevant web address, including a year's free hosting. fud is dead.
I believe Bruce Sterling wrote a short story about some sort of computerised battle robot that believed in Islam. It was pretty good, but I cannot remember the name right now. I think it is in the 'globalhead' book of short stories.
The concept behind Mr Mallard is a good idea...a robot that can follow its "mother". Now, if they could just teach my son that, I would have many fewer panic filled afternoons in the mall...
So if one is following me and the other one won't let me past....
I'm playing Zork!
God help me!
Disclaimer: MINAA (Mummy! I'm Not An Animal!)
I'll grab my old "Neural Network That Recognizes Digits" university project ...
This way i will create a robot that reads digits and then draws them by running a path in the shape of that digit (i only have to program 10 paths).
Next i'll post in Slashdot (naturally such post will be accepted) ...
From that to World Domination it will be just a small step!!!
back that ass up
I don't care about protection - just put one in the hallway who's only mission is to get through the door at the end.
then put the other one who's only job it is to guard the door... well, right be the door.
then program them to scream when parts of them fall off.
and give them lasers.
everybody love lasters. just like that tv show.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
This is a typical oversight when designing stuff mostly for internal consumption. They obviously were not planning for people to try to see the file via a dialup or something.
This fits in with the dot-bomb executives who wanted their website optimized for 1280 x 1024 or something, which is what they had in their office. Which was more clueless since those dotbomb websites were designed for public use.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
now mirror the movie please......
Erm... no. Cats, dude. They sound like robot cats.
By God, I don't see the wonder of these wonder weapons. Killing by remote control, nothing is reaffirmed. The day is quickly coming where our troops will be safely hidden in a bunker somewhere while we wipe out the enemy with a joystick.
But, what will this prove? Sure, we could kill a few more bad guys... But If the cause isn't worth dieing for, is it really worth killing for? Will this help make the world a better place, or will this just provide a way for the few to control the many?
--ST
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
Now I'm going war driving for military robots! Be afraid robots, be very afraid. All your 2.4 mhz are belong to us (the public).
I think someone should stop MIT...they're obviously trying to set up a live version of Impossible Mission. Remember, it's all fun and games until someone gets ionized.
Carousel is a lie!
So if you guys like Nick, Jaeyon, Godfrey and Magda's robots, you should check out Kickbot, a robot Chris and I made for the same class that was designed to be kicked. (These were for Rodney Brooks' Embodied Intelligence class)
check out this link for details Kickbot Homepage
And if Chris' connection gets slashdotted the final paper with all of the cool pictures can be seen at Paper Mirror PDF (1.4MB)
you trip over a stupid robot that's following you for no apparent reason.
sounds great....
Real 3-D pacman. Eat donuts left on tables by unsuspecting students, hassle the teachers until they give you that percentage point, even mount a camera on it and do some more exotic kind of exploring...
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
The researchers tested Vikia
out on passers-by. The robot would sense a person, turn its
face towards them and ask
them to stop and answer a
question.
Wonder how they did that, focus on the person being adressed. From my experience, as long as the face on the TV screen looks into the camera,
it appears to be looking stratight at you, even i you stand to the very side of the screen.
So, it'll be like in the old days, when I had a cross-eyed professor. Whenever he asked a question to the audience, he got more than one answer.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
Chewbacca: ROOOOOAR!!!!
(hallway patrol droid stops, does a reverse 180, and scoots away squeaking.)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
A time ago it ROM'd upon Chew'd ago. A case hardened box of light wave stuff, that only a clock maker master tech'ie, like ever saw, ago, but yeah only GOOD robots look out for other robots. Sounds logical to me.
8)
Peace at you. 8P
Question: Do You Have Stairs In Your House?
Space Robot Bonanza
I know you're joking, but I'm sick to death of hearing about Asimov's "Laws". He was a fiction writer and a thinker. Laws like his don't apply to the real world.
If MIT can't figure out how to keep a site slashdotted, we're all in trouble.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
more importantly, will it protect me from THE TERRIBLE SECRET OF SPACE?
Great! All I have to do now is put the blocker in front of my fridge and I might have a chance of staying on my diet. At the very least I'll get some exercise trying to out maneuver it!
A cool killer robot right now that the Pentagon is using is the Predator with a hellfire missle.
--- RFC 1149 Compliant.
there will still be risk involved... imagine one of the enemy's remote-controlled robots dropping a bomb on that joystick bunker.
the risk will be reduced, but will still be there.
besides, the ultimate goal has never been to kill people, but to remove their ability to resist you and/or achieve their nefarious goals.
0x0D 0x0A
Do not trust the pusher robot!
He is malfunctioning!
Do you have stairs in your house?
- kengineer
do you know what asimov's laws are? your post doesn't look like it, they are rules bounding the behavior of robots in his stories, other people thought that they would be a "good idea" and incorperated them into their stories, some people think that they should be implemented in real robots too
Consider the practical side of such a thing following toddlers around the house. Parents might by sold on something like this if it had a map of the house programmed in and warned if Kiddo was heading for the basement stairs or out in the back yard, etc. Think baby monitor with video and maybe even something like a local GPS. :-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"My computer beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing."
Asimov's laws require knowledge and inference that modern robots simply do not have. The better question would be whether their behavior was predictable and rigorously tested in the target domain.
Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto, domo...domo
Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto, domo...domo
Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto, domo...domo
Heh : )
Gee all that time and effort just to model the behavior I see in the hallway of my house with my dogs everyday...
=tkk
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
What I would like is a larger version of Mr Mallard, capable of carrying a case of beer.
Or perhaps it could be designed as a beer barrel, with the logics and sensors in a half-sphere on top...
it could have three wheels.. and roll around following me on my hovering desert barge..
Just a thought.
I know what they are. Any laws like those place arbitrary bounds on creativity of design. If we limited our previous technology to only that which poses no threat of harm, we would still be sitting in cottages weaving clothes by hand.
- Sorry about the slashdotting. Small server configuration error that's been fixed now. Browse away.
- Roboguard and friends were a class project; it wasn't DARPA or NSF funded, it was all for fun and a good grade.
:)
Our research group does networks and mobile systems research for our day jobs...
- The Cricket Project that was used in the "Mother" robot is part of our real research.
- Much of the robotics research at MIT happens in the AI Lab, so if you're curious about robotics, browse over there and see the things that the
Humanoid Robotics Group is doing. Very cool stuff.
-DaveThat's just what parents need, a replacement mother that at the same time can be a guard to watch the kid's surfing behaviour. :-)
Much better than that so-called Censor-ware
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
There are a ton of robots on the Mindstorms site and on robots.net that are much more sophisticated.
Sheepdot: Open Source good, Closed Source baaaaaaad!
Back in the '80s, I worked on a DOS port of an Apple II game called "Robot Odyssey" where there were "guard 'bots" that guarded certain items. In order to win, you had to program a robot with digital logic circuits to bypass the guards, or solve a puzzle.
The game was way cool, but too hard for the casual gamer. I understand the game was even used in electronics classes to teach digital logic.
Here [members.aol.com] is a site where you can see screenshots or download copies of the Apple II and DOS version.
I recall that the DOS version only worked on 8086/286 machines with color monitor and joystick.
S.E.S.S.D.E.N.E.E.NW from west end of hall of mists
If we limited our previous technology to only that which poses no threat of harm, we would still be sitting in cottages weaving clothes by hand.
Don't you know weaving poses many threats of harm?
This goes into great detail on the risks. Here's a snippet:
To sum up the main risk factors:
a) noise;
b) posture;
c) stress;
d) eye strain;
e)chemicals;
f) accidents.
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Instead of researching the difficult and unglamorous stuff which will result in the next wave of technological progress, they're playing with parrots, training their dogs over the internet, and making cutesy robots which have no use beyond getting Omni magazine and dumbed-down "isn't-science-neat"-type shows to give them publicity. Maybe this results in grants... but I can't imagine MIT alums would be so dumb as to think this is the sort of work that deserves their funding. But I worry that I am overestimating their wisdom, probably because of the mystique of MIT. The Media Lab is now the "Let the Media Stroke our Egos" lab.
Now think how you would react if you read that work like this had instead been done at SUNY Bingamton or some other or the University of Kentucky (two decent schools). Like every other sane person, you would think they're just wanking. The only reason why we don't think that of the Media Lab is because we think "oh, it's MIT, so there must be something important behind this that they don't explain in their media relations." I hate to tell you this, but there isn't.
Mind you, I'm not saying we shouldn't allow these self-righteous wankers to do their work. Self-righteous wanking is something I think should and must live on in academia. What I oppose is treating these wankers as anything but what they are, as though they had a halo around them.
spork
I wonder if they can run LegOS? Oops, did I say LegOS.
Sorry, LEGO, my bad! Please don't sue me.
the page in question describes two final projects for an introductory mit graduate class on robotics (i was the ta). while the students in question did very well, their robots aren't "research" any more than a napkin sketch of some fruit is "art". don't worry -- you'll still be able to get in your door when you get home.
and, just for the record, they're not at the media lab. damn negroponte and his imperialist media empire!
Um, it's worth noting that this was merely one class project at one class at MIT by a couple students.
:)
If this is Slashdot-worthy, then there are nearly thousands of Slashdot-worthy pages in the MIT domain alone.
For starters, every other final project for the Embodied Intelligence class for every term recently. That should be around 200 Slashdot pages right there...
Can a vacuum chamber kill spores? Will low humidity dehydrate spores.Watch out for flu w/o a runny nose. Will rain cause spores to clump? Evidenntly spores don't stick to mucous lining of branchi which is expelled by cilliated membrane of branchi. Can CO2 force spores to prematurely assume the vulnerable bacillus form? How come noone's talking
an old black and white all-in-one Mac with no hard drive, no idea what model specifically
nothing to do with the Media Lab
I loved that!
Frankly, I say screw the DoD. I want a legion of killbots to do my dark and nefarious bidding. And frankly, bringing this back on-topic, I'm pretty sure that if the robot ran amok and started killing human beings, all we'd have to do is disassemble him and give his pieces to a five-year-old. The kid will convert the parts into a cute little Lego house, and that's that.
Of course, if the Lego house ran amok and started killing people, then I'd start to get worried...
They that would sacrifice their
remote control doth not a robot make.
The predator is just a large and sophisticated remote control plane.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
This was precisely what Asimov illustrated in the difference between the Spacer and Settler cultures. The Spacers' entire lives were perfused with Three-Law robots, making them an excessively conservative, even stagnant, culture; the Settlers used no artificial sentience (but did use lesser AI technologies like fuzzy logic and expert systems), and outgrew and out-teched the Spacers by leaps and bounds because of their willingness and ability to take risks.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
I admit I haven't read much of Asimov, so I'm glad to hear that he was wise enough to recognize this. Risk-taking is the key to growth in any area.