Segway-Based Robot Opens Doors

Roland Piquepaille writes "In this short article, Technology Review tells us that Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have built a new robot, named Cardea, which is able to push open doors and has the bottom half of a Segway scooter. Cardea will be five feet tall with a torso, three arms, a variety of sensors, and a human-like head with expressive features and vision, and mounted on a Segway base. More details and references are contained in this review which also includes several pictures. For even more details, go to the Cardea Project homepage."

Comments

Re:Minsky was right

[Poodleboy]

Good grief, another brilliant invention from the self-absorbed folks at the MIT AI Lab. Minsky was quite right with his
comments. In fact, all the hard work of real engineering in this "door-opening robot" was done by the Segway people in designing the inertial feedback control systems that stabilize the thing. The Hackers seem to have used this as the basis for a glorified Lego MindStorms project. Even the referenced article in MIT's Tech Review concedes that the really clever bit is in the Segway's "dynamic balancing abilities."

Maybe if MIT would spend less time developing the egos of its students and more time on real engineering topics like control systems then they might actually turn out some useful engineers instead of self-serving, thin-skinned, xenophobic geeks incapable of working with management or peers.

Maybe we should give them a break since this is the AI Lab, and therefore a bunch of "computer scientists"--as distinct from engineers--so they probably have never solved any differential equations in their lives.

Founders of AI fundamentals like Norbert Wiener and Herbert Simon, were they alive today, would be sad to see that their brilliant initial insights have been reduced to the commercialization of substandard "robot" vacuum cleaners--that is, if their contributions were even part of the MIT AI curriculum, which they clearly are not when the department consists of mathematically-challenged, system-engineering-free computer scientists. But then, neither Wiener nor Simon were graduates of the over-hyped Institute...