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GUIs for Robots
kabir writes "OpenGL.org has a link to a fun article over at the Stanford Aerospace Robotics Laboratory. It seems an OpenGL-based GUI has been developed to enable the operation of multiple complex field robots by a single operator. The interaction mechanism was inspired by interface techniques refined in the Real-Time Strategy (RTS) genre of video games. Fifty years from now I expect all wars to be fought by giant robots controlled by teenagers."
GUI Development
A Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been developed to enable the operation of multiple complex field robots. The interaction mechanism was inspired by interface techniques refined in the Real-Time Strategy (RTS) genre of video games that includes the popular titles Starcraft, Command & Conquer, and Strifeshadow. This mechanism follows three basic steps:
The operator selects which robots to use
The operator selects which objects to be acted on
The operator selects a task to perform
However, the nature of field robotics requires some significant differences in the implementation of the RTS interface method. For instance, there is no single source of accurate global information -- each robot can only provide relative data that has to be fused together. In addition, the tasks that each robot can perform change dynamically and this information must be reflected in the choices presented by the GUI to the operator.
The GUI utilizes OpenGL to display the robot world in three dimensions. Development was significantly aided by Glt (by Nigel Stewart) and GLUI (by Paul Rademacher). Using Glt, which includes GLUI, is highly recommended, especially for C++ programmers new to OpenGL. The OpenGL picking mechanism was used in conjunction with GLUI dialog boxes to provide a direct manipulation interface for robot operation. Additional screenshots and system architecture diagrams are also available.
In the background, real-time data is being handled by NDDS from RTI. The determination of robot capabilities, which change from moment to moment depending on robot capabilities and object characteristics, is performed by the Java Theorem Prover (JTP) developed at Stanford by Gleb Frank. Communication between the GUI and JTP is carried out by the Open Agent Architecture (OAA) from SRI.
SWAT Observations
To gain insight into how humans already manage distributed teams, this research observed field exercises of a police Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team. The Palo Alto / Mountain View (California) Regional SWAT team provided access to its training exercises. The researchers were given free movement throughout the exercise area so that the activities of the commanders, the field units, the snipers, and the hostages and suspects could all be monitored. The tactical commander and field units play roles analgous to the robot operator and the field robots, respectively. The key observations made were:
-The role of the leader (commander or operator) has two primary components
*Cultivating common ground
*Coordinating action
-A natural and efficient interaction can be based on physical objects in the remote agents' (field units or robots) environment, just as with the RTS games
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
The interaction mechanism was inspired by interface techniques refined in the Real-Time Strategy (RTS) genre of video games.
This is interesting. Often it seems the games are ahead of the "serious apps".
One of my friends in high school put together a level in Duke Nukem 3D that was based on our high school. It was pretty accurate. This was pre-columbine, so nobody was thrown in jail for it.
If these game companies just put a little extra effort into retrofitting their game engines for serious purposes, they might sell the same thing for hundreds of dollars a copy. Imagine something like a first person shooter combined with The Sims. You could design your whole house, to scale, and then walk through it.
Click a menu option and output a postscript file to send to the structural engineer and architect for tweaks and approval.
Whoever does this will probably make lots of money.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be. Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.
over the left-click mass select or right-click mass select. (C&C vs. WarCraft)
Fifty years from now I expect all wars to be fought by giant robots controlled by teenagers
So does Japanimation. Ever seen Gundam Wing? 15 year old kids piloting a bunch of gigantic robots, not to mention armies of pilotless robots. Could this be the war of the future? If so, what would the point of war be? Wouldn't it be less costly to just play a game of Q3A or something?
I think this is the most graphical interface ever!
goatse.cx
Just don't try to use it!
That's what Japanese science fiction aniume has been predicting for at least 23 years. Macross, Gundam, etc...
My other first post is car post.
1) Don't take your eyes off the screen. You might get fragged.
2) Don't take your hand off the mouse. You might get fragged.
3) You only have one life. Use it wisely. And don't get fragged.
Hlynna
The one in the corner looking clueless at most everything, but enjoying it, nonetheless.
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I wanna play too
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"interaction mechanism was inspired by interface techniques refined in the Real-Time Strategy (RTS) genre of video games."
I was joking around one day PHB style bosses will want to use an RTS interface in Office to control their employees. That way, they can avoid having to actually talk to them. I stopped laughing when I realized that the technology to do that is almost in place. All we need is wirelessly connected PDA's....
"Derp de derp."
Visit IBM's Robocode and program your own deathbot! If you are old school Mac, you might remember RoboWar. A favorite of mine when I had a PowerBook 140.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
"Fifty years from now I expect all wars to be fought by giant robots controlled by teenagers."
And one hundred years from now I expect all wars to be fought by teenagers controlled by giant robots.
This is a little off-topic, but speaking of RTS interfaces ...
It seems to me that the next major leap in RTS games will come with voice control. This article encapsulates it nicely: you choose who you want to act, you tell them what action to perform, and you tell them where to perform it. In the specific application of, say, starcraft, I envision it being something like this:
Nexus Build Probe
Probes-On-Screen Mine Ore
Zealots-On-Screen Form Squad-1
Squad-1 Move Here [Mouse pointer]
Squad-1 Attack Firebats
There would be lots of detail to work out, and probably some fuzzy logic about which target is meant by firebats for example, and there's the problem of specifying certain areas (does 'here' work?) but I think once it was working it would provide a much more fluid interface with the game. This can't be far off, right? Hell, my cellphone already responds to "Call Batman On The Mobile Phone"
Here's another way to control a robot with a GUI: RobotFlow
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Yeah...but will they "shout because their weapons are voice activated"?
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
"Fifty years from now I expect all wars to be fought by giant robots controlled by teenagers."
It's not entirely clear to me that we're not already there. Aren't tanks and planes "giant robots"? What about the mentality about some of the people in the white house?
Oh, gosh, sorry, I forgot, we only criticise our goverment about domestic issues, never about foreign policy...
All they need to do is install quake and benchmark it. That or use quake as the intereface to "use" the robots... which in reality just means make them kill things.
Why voice? put a retina tracker on your eye, blink to lock on target, blink again to unlock, and blink twice to destroy. You can use your voice to do other useless things in the meanwhile.
% The Commandant addresses the graduating class.
The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall
mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is
clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you.
-- Military school Commandant's graduation address, "The Secret War of
Lisa Simpson"
http://www.snpp.com/episodes/4F21
- Life is what keeps you occupied while you are waiting to die
Your duty is clear. To build and maintain those robots.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Article said:
:-)
---"However, the nature of field robotics requires some significant differences in the implementation of the RTS interface method. For instance, there is no single source of accurate global information -- each robot can only provide relative data that has to be fused together. In addition, the tasks that each robot can perform change dynamically and this information must be reflected in the choices presented by the GUI to the operator"
Well, umm. Yes there is a single source of global information. It's called GPS. I believe, using the correct civillian gear, you can get centimeter-accurate location points. Also, political/geographic maps are available from many locations from different governments.
The best way I see that this can be used is that you create a neural network between the robots by way of bluetooth. The robots could share GPS location data in realtime. Make sure that they can pass on data to out-of-range units.
Once you have location links, you can piece screenshots (by using angles of the GPS coords). Personally, I'd craft chips designed specifically for piecing the screenshots to a 3d locale. No sense having a generic chip (x86 or whatnot) doing that. And NO beowulf clusters
Yeah, teenagers controlling battles. Someone reads a little too much Orson Scott Card maybe...
--
Disclaimer: The above statement probably includes half-truths, because real truth is too complicated.
Fifty years from now I expect all wars to be fought by giant robots controlled by teenagers.
Which is a lot better than having our teenagers fighting in person !!!
2002-02-12 14:54:27 Operating Systems for Robots (articles,programming) (rejected)
being summer, maybe folks have time to read now.
;-)
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Sweet, now I can finally play Starcraft in real time, not on some computer in stupid simulated time... what will the think of next???
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wars fought by robots in teh future controlled by teenagers. hmmmmm is anyone here reminded of enders game. just wondering.
The site listed had bad links, sorry. But you can download RoboWar 4.4 from info-mac. This is the 4.4 version, I think there is a 4.5.2 version that was the last developed but I can't find it online. If you have a copy or know where I could download it, please reply. I would like to see the bots I wrote in 1995 still work. :)
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
After that, alas, the book turns into an Idiot Plot with sadistic fundamentalists trying to blow up the world, the prevention of which requires that liberals have to peform brain surgery to mentally link everyone together and make them think right.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Enders Game. Orson Scott Card. Nuff said...
-=fshalor
and all this time I was worried I was wasting the 4 hours a night playing RTCW
-NetMagi
[NN]I'm_Drunk
"d00d, ur hax0ri|\|g 4g4i|\|!"
"I'm not camping you camper fag!"
"I 0wnz j00!"
etc...
Karma whorin' since 1999
You misinterpreted the meaning of "global" - they did not mean co-ordinate data, rather they meant the state of "the world".
In a game, the gameserver knows where everything is. In robotics, the control program doesn't know for certain that the blue cube is at 0.1x3.5y99.1z - it has to get that information by looking at what the sensors on the robots say, and those sensors lie. So the control program has to take all the data from all the robots and try to fuse it into something meaningful, all the while keeping in mind that "things are not what they seem".
That is why controlling a real-world robot is MUCH harder than controlling a player in a video game.
www.eFax.com are spammers
GLUI, though. Yech. That's a crappy toolkit. You have to modify the guts of the thing to add new widgets, the architecture is a mess, and it has problems synchronizing the front and back buffers. GLOW is much better. I've used both. Both are menu and widget toolkits built entirely on top of OpenGL. This gives cross-platform portability. Doing 2D widgets through the 3D OpenGL engine seems inefficient, but it works well. If you have 3D hardware, you may as well use it. It's an relatively clean way to program.
"Fifty years from now I expect all wars to be fought by giant robots controlled by teenagers." Voltron! Power Rangers! Tranzor Z! Cool Coooool!!
How ya like dat?
Fifty years from now I expect all wars to be fought by giant robots controlled by teenagers
.....I miss SeaQuest.
the contrys that have not the money to buy such robots? Would there be robots trampeling through these contrys just steping on ppl?
And a short story I read had all wars being fought with insults, and teritory was lost or gained based on the superiority of the insults, as determined by aa computer.
Of course, no insult can ever beat "How appropriate. You fight like a cow." (Apologies to the fine folks at LucasArts Games for blatantly ripping off Monkey Island.
They that would sacrifice their
What if someone hax0rs the robots, like the enemy?
Seriously.
Fifty years from now I expect all wars to be fought by giant robots controlled by teenagers.
Predator, Global Hawwk, Dark Star anyone?
But realistically, the 3rd world will still be the 3rd world, even 50 years from now. And will still be fighting over the same patches of dry barren ground as they are today.
It doesn't count as a win until some 19 year old with a rifle is standing on that patch of ground
Sorry, won't happen.
There will be cheats: autoaim, speed etc. One can also expect some kind of robot which actually won't fight at all: a robot-sniper.
Of course, in a war, this wouldn't be called cheating, but technology.
Also, differently from Quake, "fair play" is a non-issue... or should I say exactly like in Quake?
In Ender's Game, OSC wrote about children commanding fleets of starships in interstellar war, while thinking they were merely playing a game. This type of scenario is looking more and more plausible every day.
Don't forget Liberia, Rwanda, and the Congo :-)
What I think is more likely is that fifty years from now we will see the US decimate more 3rd world countries using robots controlled by teenager, who only think they are playing a game and thus will never reveal what they have done to the media, and in fact no one will ever find out since the press were never informed, and those who try to find out will be detained indefintately without trial for allegedly breaking the latest anti-terrorist laws which prohibit attempting to criticise national defence actions in any circumstances.
Well come to the wonderful future Mr. Bush is building for the world.
"Me and my girl named bimbo . . . limbo . . . spam" - Captain Beefheart.
How will they deal with map hacks?
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Imagine an entire field of bots controlled thousands of miles away in a comfortably air-conditioned room by elite gamers. Some gamers who specialize in RPG would control masses of bots while FPS (Quake) gamers would control specialized solo bots (assasins, mega-bots, scouts). Zero casualites, at least by the bot side, is possible.
Fifty years from now I expect all wars to be fought by giant robots controlled by teenagers
In stark contrast to the situation today, where wars are fought by teenagers controlled by giant robots.
-- MarkusQ
The future Geneva Convention, expanding on the origional:
:)
1) No camping.
2) Maphacks are illegal.
3) No killing of medics. Still.
4) Don't make fun of the Koreans. They'll whoop your butt.
5) Don't insult the mods.
Any violations of these rules could result in trial by war tributal
Maybe it's just me, but this is gonna be the coolest game of MechWarrior EVER!!!!!
Base 2 yields only ARTIFICIAL Intelligence
Recommended reading: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Give Carnage Heart a try.
It's a similar game, that was made for the Sony Playstation.
It was surprisingly fun to program in, and believe it or not the battles were actually interesting to watch (unlike in Robocode)
I've never understood why someone doesnt just make a battle-bot loaded with the quake engine, program some Quake AI into it, and put in a Map of the arena...
Or at least, have a Quake-Style keyboard interface. Those RC controllers are bitchy
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I would like my robots to be programmed with cheesy comic book style battle statements like "full re-route" or "utilize maximum force" or "sensors detect hostility" like microwave in the computer game "Freedom Force"
LOL. Old DOS game called One Must Fall 2097 was based on the premise that in the year 2097, there were giant 60-foot tall robots that were controlled remotely by humans that fought against each other.
This article just triggered a little deja vu.
incidently, has anyone ever experienced vuja de? the sudden, inexplicable feeling that this has never happened before?
- Richard
And you thought trying to keep track of your hotkeyed units in Warcraft was hard...
CC
Look at Paul Rajlich's VR model of his home for his CAVE here.
In fact, it's not very tough designing something like that. Anybody who's tried designing games or game levels, even simple ones would know how easy this is.
For example, look at NeHe's simple 3d engine demo - you could easily build any structure you want for one of these, with sufficient skill modeling your house wouldn't be any more difficult than mapping a few co-ordinates. It'd be cooler still if you could import some format like DXF or VRML or the like into a suitable map.
Fifty years from now I expect all wars to be fought by giant robots controlled by teenagers.
Oh yeah, that'll be just grand.
*BOOM, giant robot bites the dust.*
: |US|B0TL0RD `W00T!'
: ]AoE[slaya `whore! u woz camping!'
: |US|B0TL0RD `u axis lamerz just cant take it. go back to libya'
: ]AoE[`fuk u! im getting kofi to ban u! U SUK BUSHS WANG!'
So is how I see it...
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
>Fifty years from now I expect all wars to be fought by giant robots controlled by teenagers
Wow, Giant Robots Controlled By Teenagers is a fantastic name for a band!!
iniguito.
I bet Ender was a whizz at Starcraft, taking on all those Buggers^WZerglings.
Fifty years from now I expect all wars to be fought by giant robots controlled by teenagers
"The wars of the future will not be fought on earth, but in space, or at least on top of very high mountains, and they will be fought by robots. It will be your job to maintain and service those robots."
Commandant, Rommelwood Military Academy
Fifty years from now I expect all wars to be fought by giant robots controlled by teenagers.
Did you ever see that unfortunate Robin Williams vehicle, Toys? They had the same idea, pretty much
adam
Let's hope that they do not repeat the killer robot incident
Watch it again--Yohko and the gang really are inside the battleships.
The key is that they're using teleportation-based ejection systems, so if they take a lethal hit, the pilot is returned to the command center without a scratch.
--
"Fifty years from now I expect all wars to be fought by giant robots controlled by teenagers." fifty years from now i expect to see all wars fought between robots and humans fighting for their freedom against robotic oppression.
Hmmm....am I the only one that has never read Enders Game and instead took this as a reference to an episode of SeaQuest?
of course, wrote a fantastic book called Ender's Game
I make these: http://beatseqr.com
One of the main potential military applications of robots is working in built-up areas, because these are so hazardous for soldiers. DARPA sponsors a LOT of work in this area, for example the MARS program.
The current most successful approaches are all broadly statistical, providing a means to "see through" the noise, drift and variations in robot sensor readings. Sebatian Thrun's group at CMU has some of the best work in this area (for an overview, see this review paper. Andrew Howard at USC has some cool movies here showing his technique based on a physical spring/damper metaphor. Great stuff.
This problem is here to stay. If you have ideas, join a grad school program and help out!
Yeah it may sound like robots controlled by kids in 50 years... but what country could afford a mass war with 4 story robots? How much electronics and fuel would that take? Talk about quite a lot of upkeep. More likely... 50 years from now all wars will be fought on the net. Sounds like a movie, doesn't it?
Seriously think about it, every corporate company has an internal network and a web page. As computers grow, so will what they can do for us. Corporates will take advantage of this to capatlize on profits and thus will be born the real matrix. No, the real new wars will be headed by hackers hired for fraud/espionage in a whole new world.
Global information is not just position information, it's world state information.
Fire fighting robots - for example - might be the only way for which smoke level and heat level info at there location is communicated, but there is no single known state (or Global source) for this information. And it changes with time. Robot 5 reports it can no longer advance due to a heat threshold level hit, not the GUI operator has one less function availible for that robot (or perhaps more.)
If teenagers commanded the robots, they'd all be downloading music and chatting on AOL together!
;-)
Teenagers don't know how to make love or war. We Geeks With Joysticks know both!
----- All Hail the Monkey Lich...now fetch me some undead bananas!