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Feral Robot Dogs

Posted by michael on from the eating-steaks-that-grow-on-trees dept.

stinkypig sent in a blurb about Feral Robot Dogs, assorted modifications of the commercial AIBO dogs to be "more useful". For various definitions of useful. See also a discussion on smartmobs.com.

9 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. What's with AIBO and DCMA? by will_die · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Based on this article it would seem that Sony does not people modding thier robot dog. So is that article the latest word or has Sony wisened up?

    1. Re:What's with AIBO and DCMA? by Falkkin · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Check out Tekkotsu -- it's an open-source library for the AIBO, being developed by a bunch of folks at CMU. The "Fearless Leader and Principal Scientist" of the project is Dave Touretzky, whom Slashdotters may remember as the man behind the Gallery of CSS Descramblers and his testimony in the NY DVD trial.

      It once cost a substantial amount of money to buy an AIBO devkit from Sony; I now think they're wising up by opening up the SDK and allowing GPLd libraries like Tekkotsu to exist.

  2. Legal issues around feral robots by maharg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm just wondering the about the legal issues surrounding the release of a 'feral' robot..

    When you release your feral robot to freely wander about, would you have any legal right of ownership over it, if, say, someone else took it into their own possession ?

    On the converse, could you be held responsible for it's actions ?

    Are there any legal precendents around for any of this stuff ?

    --

    $ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
    @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
    1. Re:Legal issues around feral robots by maharg · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Let's see...you bought a car. You now own it. You drive it responsibly...the fact that you may or may not have maintained the brakes and tyres is relevant because you're responsible for it. The fact that there are design faults in the brakes and tyres is also relevant. In this scenario you could well be completely absolved of any responsibility for any damage it causes due to the design faults.

      See the problem ?

      If a fault was unintentionally, or even malicously coded into the robot's software, could you be held responsible ?

      The Killer Robot story makes an interesting read..

      How is that any different than putting a crowbar in my John Deere's steering wheel and letting it loose on my neighbor's lawn?
      The difference my friend, is that legal precendents around the use of John Deeres equipment were set long ago....

      --

      $ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
      @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
  3. So... by cjpez · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... will we be seeing some Stephenson rat things wandering around anytime soon, then?

    --
    Al Qaeda has ninjas!
  4. Note from the sysadmin by pemerson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's a 600MHz Celeron with 60MB RAM. I was surprised I didn't see any smoke when I went to reboot it.
    I just throttled back MaxClients in httpd.conf. You'll be able to get in a little bit easier now, for a little while at least.

    And no, I have no control over the content or the hardware.

  5. I worked with these at the Florida Film Festival by mistermund · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This project made its debut at the 2003 Florida Film Festival here in Orlando about a month or so ago. I worked on the dogs for a day, helping assemble some of the first prototypes. The dog platform they used was initially a cheap toy (Mega-Byte) that they purchased for about $10. Then, they added particulate sensors which were sensitive to Co2 and other things like gasoline, etc. A new stepper motor assembly replaced the front legs, and a single tail wheel carried the rear. This is the bot you see at the top of the "Smart Mobs" link. The system basically got a variable voltage reading off the particulate sensors, then fed that to a PIC which did a linear variable speed control to the drive motors in the front. Ex: gasoline vapor on the left of the bot would drive the bot forward and to the left.

    Modding a single dog took about 2-3hrs per dog, if you count in the soldering and layout of the PCB and the modification of the dog shell.

    The purpose of the exhibit was to create a mediagenic event around coordinated releases of the dogs. There's a development here in Orlando called Baldwin Park, which has a bit of notoriety around it for being build on the site of an old Army base. They wanted to draw attention to the repurposing of these dogs and the fact that they could be used to make a statement, rather than trying to expose specific polluters, etc

    It was kind of fun working on the dogs, and to see them run. We sent a team out into the field to videotape the dogs in action - supposedly they took it to a Burger King and it just ran into a corner. On a construction work site, one dog caught a whiff of a truck and went rolling after it. ;^)

    We had fun working on the dogs, but weren't able to spend much time discussion the potential for this kind of renegade modding - in that sense I was a bit disappointed. But the whole sense of modding these dogs is what Slashdot is all about! Unfortunately, they don't run Linux yet...

  6. Re:useful? by beaverfever · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I agree about the price - my first thought when reading this was 'who would pay for this?'

    My second thought was 'why use robot dogs to check for pollutants? Why not just have a person walk around with sensors on a stick? If someone thought the area was really toxic, so toxic that a person couldn't safely be in the area (but for some reason a school was going to be built there), then why not just use a radio controlled car and save $1350 per unit?

    I do believe that nerds have a tendency to let the 'gee-whiz' get in the way of common sense sometimes.

    Oh, but wait - I forgot this point - this idea is to "create a local mediagenic event" and "enable and change typical lay-expert communication patterns, by raising the standards of evidence, or at least changing who produces this evidence". So, if I'm Mr. Burns and I find these things crawling around on the land around my powerplant, what's stopping me from sending Smithers out to pick them up and throw them in the lake?

    --
    RTFM; please, I beg you.
  7. Re:useful? by po8 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So, if I'm Mr. Burns and I find these things crawling around on the land around my powerplant, what's stopping me from sending Smithers out to pick them up and throw them in the lake?

    Heh. When my doctoral advisor was at Stanford, Shakey the Robot was there, and always had a crowd of graduate students following it around. My advisor got tired of this, and told the folks running Shakey: "If Shakey wanders into my office, it's not coming out."

    The operators put foil tape in front of my advisor's office door, and a photosensor in the base of Shakey, to guard against this calamity.

    Or so I've been told...