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Transforming a Laptop into a Robot
NathanZ writes "Evolution Robotics is selling what looks like a docking station on wheels as a way to transform a laptop into a robot. I'm not exactly sure how this can be useful since the "robot" has no arms. According to their website, "you can train your robot to do things like recognize objects and places, send email, take pictures and video, respond to voice commands, and more!". Yipee. At least it would give me something to do with that old Toshiba laptop sitting in the closet."
[out of keyboard] Form feet and legs!
[out of display] Form arms and body!
[out of Windows XP] And I'll form the head!
[Robot's body shortly turns blue with white lettering crawling around it like an obscene electronic text ticker, and falls on its side ala the Dirty Old Man from Laugh-In.]
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Wouldn't voice recognition be better than a visual system for commands? I'd rather say "Play U2" than have to fetch a U2 CD to wave in front of its face for it to play music. And since you have to train it anyway by showing it various objects, it just seems like voice recognition would've been the smarter route.
While the beer routine made a good demonstration, Gross said he expects the system to have many useful real-world applications.
I don't need it any more useful than that.
Come to think of it, is there anything more useful for a laptop-on-a-trolley to do?
(Remember, it has no arms - hang on, how did it fetch my beer?)
--
(if you're still looking for the point, it was back there, in the post. </sig>)
I would definitely build one of these things and epoxy a bong holder, nug jar, and lighter holder to it. Then I would never have to leave the couch again. Well, 'cept to use the bathroom...
"HAL, come get your daddy high". Yep.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
My amd bot will kick your intel bot up and down the street. Now a beowulf cluster of these would certainly be a party. Droves of robots armed with 802.11 roaming around bumping into each other. It's a far cry from the matrix but we can teach them to be evil!
I'm not exactly sure how this can be useful since the "robot" has no arms.
How about R2-D2? Sure, he has little tools for welding and grabbing sausages from Yoda, but he doesn't have any really useful arms. Most of his best roles were acting as a big mobile laptop that could help navigate spaceships and hack into the Death Star. As well as provding some comic relief. I bet he could play MP3's too.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
Sounds like the ultimate bachelors tool to me:
-you can train it to get you a new beer (with the robot arm), doesn't need any explanation.
-you can train it to recognize places and objects: really handy if you drank too much of those beers. "where the hell is my bedroom? - please follow me sir.." or "what's the name of the broad in my bedroom?"
-you can have it send email: "send got sick excuse email #34 to work"
-you can have it play mp3's: it can also recognize people, combine those two and next time a skirt walks into your place it'll start playing your 70s-sweet-luvvin' mp3's (already did that, just clap my hands twice to start it)
basicly it can do a lot of things a girlfriend can do, some people will find this highly argueable and they will come up with things like sex and stuff. Well I suspect you can have handsfree pr0n-session with the thing as well. (Or with the thing and your girlfriend at the same time and even record at the same moment).
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
Forget "video capture resolution."
The specs _I_ want to know are: how thick a rug can it run on? Can it go over a 3/4"-high threshold? How is it at navigating obstacles? How resistant to floor dirt is it (hint: some of us have Newfoundland dogs, they shed, the hair is long enough to wind around a vacuum cleaner beater bar and jam it...)?
What about stair-climbing?
Looks like it's only useful in a space that has a single, flat, clean floor. How many readers live in a space that fits that description?
Now, as a way of ferrying parts around a factory floor like those big "Pronto" systems...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Sorry for the rant..
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
Tech: Hello, Toshiba technical support.
Client: Uhhh, I put my laptop in one of those robot kits. Now its rolling around the house, screaming that its alive and not to "disassemble Johnny five".
CLICK
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
I'm working on a robot project with the Stupid Fun Club, and we're going to build the Evolution laptop into a much bigger heavier duty robot body, to control it. [These people started the Robot Wars competition, but this particular robot is designed to be peaceful, even friendly and social.] The big friendly robot is still under construction, so I decided to assemble Evolution's cute smaller modular robot to see how it works.
It took an afternoon to put together the lego-like parts to build the Evolution robot kit. It included a bunch of aluminum beams, lots of ingenious modular plastic connectors, nuts and bolts, wheels and motors, bump and IR distance sensors, and some awesome ultra-heavy-duty velcro.
The IR distance sensors were somewhat tricky to attach, had flakey connectors, and don't all work; but everything else was quite straightforward and easy. I haven't had so much fun with legos in years!
We're using a laptop recommended and preconfigured by Evolution: an IBM Thinkpad type 2612-1bu. Most interesting is the software, which runs on Linux. Evolution has developed a "robotic operating system", which is written in C++ and configured with XML.
It has a visual behavior programming language for connecting together boxes (representing software behavior modules) with wires (representing data types of input and output parameters).
It's kind of like the "SimAntics" language used to program The Sims, but much simpler, more general purpose, and extensible.
The behavior modules are implemented in C++ and compiled into dynamically linked libraries or built into the application. There's a C++ SDK for programming your own behavior modules, with which I've just started experimenting.
XML schema files describe the module interfaces (name, description, library, symbol, parameters, input and output ports with data types, etc). They're not standard XML-Schema, just Evolution's own special purpose behavior schema format, which is appropriate for the task.
XML behavior files assemble a bunch of modules and connect them together into high level behavior networks, which you can use to build even higher level behavior networks in a modular fashion.
There's a visual programming tool implemented in Java that lets you graphically construct networks of behavior modules, or you can simply type them in as XML in a text editor.
Unfortunately the behavior construction tool isn't integrated with the behavior execution engine, so you have to run them separately, so you can't actually edit the behaviors in place while they're running.
Other visual programming languages like SimAntics and Bounce let you edit live programs while they are running, which is extremely useful.
The software side of the Evolution robotics kit includes modules for voice synthesis and voice recognition (IBM's ViaVoice libraries), as well as video capture, some simple image processing, sensor reading, motor control, network communication, teleoperation, a simple emotion engine and animated human face, and a bunch of other stuff.
But unfortunately the source code for many of the interesting modules is not included, so if they don't do exactly what you want you have to replace them from scratch.
For example, the human face emotion animation module doesn't support texture mapped faces. That's fine if your robot's face is Kermit the Frog, but I want to use face skins from The Sims. If Evolution decided to include more module source code with the SDK, programmers would be able to customize it more easily, instead of reinventing the wheel.
In summary, I like Evolution's modern and open architecture, and the code that I've seen so far is quite well designed and nicely written. But I'd like to see more code, please! One of the big problems in robotics is smoothly integrating many different pieces of software and hardware, and I think they've taken a good approach to that problem. Now they have to enable developers to easily integrate many different software and hardware modules, and let them all fight it out.
-Don
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