Slashdot Mirror
A Full-Size Remote-Control Car
Ant writes "A video clip (Windows Media Player required) the construction, operation, and demolition. It is a real-life remote control car with Knight Rider references!" The video works fine for me in xine (though sound dropped out for a bit). This car is not yet ready for the Las Vegas run, but if they hook up with some AI reseachers ...
Jay! You can finally program AND drive at the same time!
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Nothing we haven't seen before. Apparently the British are about five years ahead of us in the cool gadget department.
The site appears to have been screwed up. Anyone else getting a strange redirect?
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
It is a real-life remote control car with Knight Rider references!
As long as those references include Bonnie and April but leave out Michael and Devon, then they'll be OK.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Well, CMU already did this long ago. They use Neural-Nets and they can cruise the highway at 70 mph. The test run is completely automated. Of course there's someone at the driver seat in case that there's something wrong. Interestingly, although the AI system successfully cruising the road, the detection sometimes mistaken a white tree bark for the road divider....
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
I think if I ever had a car like this, I would only purchase from businesses that would come out front and drop whatever it was I was buying into the passenger side window. Having a car like this would be like having an almost free delivery service for any place in town....
The server has got great bandwidth too, considering the deeplink to the file right on the front page (I got 300KB/s).
You could really do some damage with one of these - think Carmagedon in the centre of a city - and you'd stay pretty undetected. There was a "Murder She Wrote" episode about that once.
they did this on scrapheap challenge (uk equivalent of junkyard wars) too, bit they had to fight each other, theirs seem like a bit of a kludge compared to this one though :)
That's the same car I use to drive to work you insensitive clod!
>
This could give new meaning to those words.
in case someone needs a mirror.
What is Windows Media Player? It doesn't come with SuSE...
The hand-held steering wheel, foot controled accelorator / brake combination has clearly worked very sucessfully up to this day. Would a hand-held remote control for all three potentially make things easier for learners who have grown up with electronic equipment? People with disabilities?
In the (admitedly unlikely) situation of a driver having a heart attack / stroke while driving, a passenger could take over simply by grabbing the remote and stop the car safely. Just thinking aloud.
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Jeezuz. WE've had this for years in the UK. There's even a TV series called "Combat Cars" where they take a car, turn it into remote control, add armour and weapons then battle them in a "Robot Wars" type competition.
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
It plays fine with mplayer.
And by the way the mirror is at the DMP
Please add your own, my computer cant take too much.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
I cant wait till I can go order takeaway without having to do much at all.
Or just playing games with the cops.
Forget those micro-racers, those little tiny remote control cars that made a perfect fad gist over christmas last year. I can see it now. Every 10 year old kid will want one of these put in their christmas stocking. "But dad, It's not a real car! IT's remote control! Joey across the street has a remote control car! Why can't I?"
There is the valid point that by giving your kit an RC car of this size, you'd never have to give him another christmas gift for the rest of his life. It would also be an effective deterrent to potential playground bullies, knowing that your kid has the ability to run them down and get away clean.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
It looks as if they wanted to destroy the poor old Camary, it looked like fun, and it needed to be shown that Toyota's aren't any more invulnerable to mistreatment than any other car manufacturer may be.
That sounds cool, of course, but there's a thing... my name is not Michael, is this thing going to listen to me? :)
Can't wait to say 'Kitt, take us home'
Txurlo
I love how they demonstrated the throttle using the trigger-controller before they started the car, and it was cool to seem them driving it around in the desert. Very impressive work.
I liked this up until they started beating the shit out of the car. They literally did all that work to trash the damn thing. They made it do jumps, tried to ski it on two wheels (which eventually made it flip over), rammed it with their trucks, and completely destroyed it. I don't get it. They made this really badass full-size remote controlled car, then they killed it.
Oh, and posting an article with a direct link to a video file? Dammit, that's pretty lame and inconsiderate. You could have linked to a page with some detail that wasn't a direct goddamned link to the video file. Sheesh.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
... a full size remote control girlfriend for geeks.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
From the Slashdot story: "A video clip (Windows Media Player required) the construction, operation, and demolition."
A verb an action word. I know verbs minor details to a Slashdot editor, but they important to others of us.
"What are you inserting into my exhaust pipe Micheal?"
Download Opera 9 (in the BETA forum)
The suicide, and subsequent martyrdom, is a very important element in the process. It has a profound psychological impact on both sides of the conflict. I'm sure cars like these will be used for attack, but they probably won't eliminate the suicide bomber.
BTW, why was parent post modded troll?
I won't claim to be a car expert, but having had to fix my own car's brake, steering, and throttle systems, I'm pretty sure that they specifically did this to wreck the Camry, rather than to demo the tech.
First thing that I would do, if I were going to build one of these for real/permanent, is that I would change how the braking and throttle systems work. The way a modern car pulls input from the driver isn't very effective unless you're putting that level of pressure on pedals and steering, as evidenced by their rig that was applying force to pedals. Brakes, for one, could be operated off of a very small solenoid if you changed the brake power booster, which are designed to accomodate the right resistance to a human foot. Change that, and things become simpler. You can switch to a tiny activation system rather than something that looks like it was used to tilt a dump truck.
From their video, I couldn't tell how they had worked the steering, if it was actually analog or if it was cheapo-RC "full left", vs "full right" steering. Analog would definitely be the way to go, but if one uses a really small control, it would be easy to oversteer, causing loss of control. Probably why they picked dirt (even assuming that there was the possibility of using pavement that was far enough away that no one would care).
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
i dont think anyone else has one currently going...but here's mine: http://www.pchopper.com/mirror/RCCar_video_new.wmv .zip
It's great to see so many people talking about our car. And thanks for putting a link to my page instead of directly to the video file.
http://www.jdfab.com/dp2/rccar.htm
The old one is down and a new smaller file has been uploaded, we have had over 50,000 hits in the last two days and about 300gb of transfer on the server... Crazy...
It sounds like some people aren't sure why we destroyed the car after spending time to build it. Well basically we wanted to build one for a couple of years, and the goal was to do something fun and crazy with it so I have good footage to put in my next desert racing video, Dezert People - Second Lap. We built a new car from a 1987 Celica for the TechTV show, The Screen Savers, techtv.com. See the Interview on the link from my site. and later we plan to build a second car so we have two to play with. Basically its all about good footage for our desert racing videos. www.dezertpeople.com
Curtis - jdfilms.com