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Robosapien: Latest Toy Robot From Mark Tilden
Onnimikki writes "Mark Tilden has been building really cool BEAM robots for a long time. Now, he's come up with RoboSapien, a toy that no self-respecting geek can go without. Videos of the RoboSapien at the 2004 New York City Toy Fair have been made available by Solarbotics. Mark offers some really good explanations about what makes them work."
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
at best buy, 100$ pricetag
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
"A full function fast moving robot minion suitable for all your world domination needs."
And for only $99? Wow, we should've invested in these in Iraq.
Well, I have to give this guy credit, for when he was playing God he didn't choose to create RoboSapien in his own image.
I mean, shit, a big robotic dude with mean chops would freak me out.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
Blatantly policital:
Good thing he didn't name it HomoSapien, or the Terminator/Gov. of California (difficult to tell which part is more of a stretch) would say:
What a Homo Robot? That is illegal!
A small, somewhat cute robot that wouldn't freak you at at 4 AM if you bumped into it.
Actually, I found this pretty cool. Amazing these little guys have such ablities consdering the technology.
After seeing countless videos of many different robots, this is on the only one I could see putting on my desk. Don't know how the ghosts who haunt my abode are going to feel about it though.
it isn't $600. :)
...our tiny, little overlords.
- Speaks fluent international "caveman".
It's nice to see more interest in 'caveman', unlike dying languages such as Latin or 'Furby'.
Although 'caveman' is not a selection at Babel Fish yet.
"- 67 pre-programmed functions including pick-up, throw, kick, sweep,dance, fart, beltch, rap, and half-a-dozen different kung-fu moves.
- Speaks fluent international "caveman".
- Three demonstration modes: Disco dance, Rude behavior, and Kung Fu kata.
Well, looks like I'm going to lose my job to a $100 robot.
If not, that should be stage two. Why buy one $99 minion to bully your colleagues with, when you can buy two that will work as a team (heh). And of course, who could resist the sick pleasure of making them fight each other for batteries.
-- The unsig...
The philosophy of BEAM robotics
Bigger picture:
http://www.androidworld.com/www_toy.jpg
Video:
http://www.iirobotics.com/downloads/robozip.zip
Farts, belches, who needs bio-brats when you can have one of these for $99 and less than 9 months waiting time.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Pray tell, why is this an especially interesting development? This toy is basically a remote-controlled device. Far from a "robot", like AIBO or QRIO which actually have autonomous capabilities and can decide to do things on their own.
:)
I move to strike the word "robot" from any device that is not autonomous in some fashion...
A full function fast moving robot minion suitable for all your world domination needs.
*looks at robot*
Well, sure, if you plan to dominate the portion of the world that's smaller than 14 inches.
I guess that could work. I mean, if you control the floors and electrical outlets, you pretty much control everything.
The coolest voice ever.
BestBuy is taking preorders for RoboSapien at $99.99 shipped free.
Toysrus.com has it for $89.99 but no free shipping.
I got this at least second hand so if somebody has a more accurate version I would be interested to hear it.
Mark was giving a presentation at a conference. He was showing off one of his small insect robots. He then (to the audience's horror) crumpled it up like a wad of paper and put it down on top of the overhead projector. The audience was then able to see it unfold itself and walk away.
Unfortunately, the story has a larger context which explains how it comes to be that Mark is down in the States rather than still here in Canada. Again, I would be interested in hearing an accurate version of the story.
Because the robots he builds aren't build using fast microcontrollers and heuristics to get things to move. They're designed using analog techniques (i.e. discrete amplifiers, capacitors, and resistors instead of a custom ASIC - similar to the way people designed things like TVs 30yrs ago with only a couple dozen transistors versus the millions of logic gates in modern TVs). So instead of using a digital timer on a chip you could use a charging capacitor. Well designed analog systems can be much better than digital solutions.
The main reason people don't do things in analog more often is that its hard to design and its typically even harder to design something that can be mass produced (due to tolerances/ manufacturing variations). A popular control systems design book has a photo of his UniBug on the cover because it's such a neat applications of controls theory. The bug can walk without needing any long fine tuning to get parameters to just the right value.
Of course analog design suffers from a whole host of problems that the digital world is relatively immune to. For example, noise in an analog system is a huge killer whereas noise in a digital system isn't so bad untill you start working at >100MHz. For example, 1-2mv (that's 10^-3) of noise in your analog system can be deadly if you're amplifying that signal by 100x-1000x whereas 1-2mv of noise in a digital part isn't such a big problem.
The Solarbotics server is under a bit of stress, so here's a torrent for all four video files, 42.7MB total.
The real world can be analog and digital at the same time. It's red not blue. it's a sort of pinkish red. Is time discreet or continuos? What do you mean you do not know!
Fixed, what is fixed? There are a lot of fixed values in the human body. In fact most of the body is based on very fixed processes. Feed back, is a very fixed response. The complexity comes with the sheer number of feedback systems working in parrallel. We cannot model this complexity with a pre-programmed system, but it may be possible to simulate the feedback and then set those loose to model the system.
Have you _EVER_ worked with a digital robot, adding a new senosr is not easy? Adding a new response is not easy. In fact this is one of the main stumbling blocks of digital robots. Everytime you add a new sensor you have to explicity program for it. That means the robot is limited by the imagination/time of the designer.
In response to your last paragraph, take a look at beam robots. See how they can do tasks with a few components that complex digital robots cannot. See how they deal with component failures. Think about how this ties back to nature. See that tieing into a feedback circuit is easy, but ultimately unpredictable.
This whole area is opening up after 50+ years of going in the wrong direction and achieving only predictable systems. AI/AL is embracing simple systems that combine automatically to implement complexity.
Read Stephen Wolfram, Steve Grand and Mark Tilden. All three are showing that unpredictable complexity can be modeled by designing simple feedback systems and then letting them interfere with each other. Chaos theory is the underlying mathamatics.
To cast aside this arena as just a cheap toy is to be blind to the sheer scope of the undertaking.
Orville, Wilbour put down that paper plane it's just a toy.