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Build a Robot out of a Car?
SomeRobotGuy writes "A researcher in the U.K. is in the process of building an autonomous biped robot out of a Mini Cooper r50. Its functions are controlled by six computers running RTLinux and it's powered by an internal combustion engine. And the thing's not tiny, at over 10 feet tall! The site includes videos showing some impressive results."
... and After Effects.
Fifteen comments and the server appears to have bit the dust.
Slashdot should come up with some automatic link-cacheing system or something...
free speach
Did you mean: free speech
Yeah, I mean I guess they are trying out of the box advertising, but stuff like this isn't so good. It suckers people who don't know what the state of the art is in robotics and don't know that what is displayed here is all fake. Now I'll have to see how many of my less technically adept (or frankly just gullible) friends send this link to me.
Of course I agree it's a problem, just giving my thoughts on the situation...
Jonah Hex
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
You know, after all these years you'd think slashdot would have tried to come up with something that wouldn't cripple the web sites they link to, and cost poor unsuspecting people hugely increased bandwidth fees. For a website that always tries to position itself as siding with the independent, pre-commercial spirit of the internet, the Slashdot editors have a really lousy sense of ethics.
Yup, this is advertising. Genius, but still just a Mini plug. Check the whois then google the parent company.
Kip Hawley is an idiot.
Yep, remember your conservation of momentum, the bot doesn't move when it grabs the car, it should at least absorb part of the kinetic energy and have to push back, or be pulled along with the car a tiny bit. Consider a similar collision on a smaller scale, what would happen if you tried to halt a guy on a bicycle?
And notice the bot casts a shadow but the car doesn't. Totally fake. Also notice all these "tests" are done with a locked-down camera, that's a giveaway of a bad CG producer, anyone with real skills would have used a handheld camera and used move matching.
Right on!
What makes it even worse is that they have a busines model around fukcing over unsuspecting people. You pay them to see the site before it gets completely crippled (I notice that some times people take down movies and won't put them back up after a slashdotting). Now if it wasn't for the slashdot effect, would so many people pay for slashdot accounts?
M0571y H@rml355.
Gosh, asking for permission is so hard! It's clearly better to crush their site and potentially make them pay thousands of dollars in bandwidth overages instead.
--riney
I don't think so. If they honor the robots.txt, they should be fine. Google and archive.org do basically the same thing.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
Think about this: It took Honda years, and millions of dollars to create the ASIMO robot, which does nothing compared to what this one did stopping the car, and unscrewing the bolt from the wheel (robot arm dexterity test). ASIMO was also created by a huge team of mechanics, scientists, and programmers. This guy actually wants us to believe that he 1. built the thing, 2. programmed all the fast, complex motions, and 3. built it out of a cooper? bullshit. I dont even think that with the weight of the car applied to the motors the thing was using, that they could have as much torque and speed as they did. This may have been more believable if he made a more official looking website, and faked some press activity. I mean if it were real, this would have been all over the news by now, doing demonstrations and everything.
>Seems like it's become a custom around here to destroy small hobbyist sites.
/. effect is great weapon to use on these assholes.
In this case 'small hobbyist' turns out to be guerrilla/deceptive marketers and the
Of course, I'd love to be wrong (I hope I am, I'd love to see such a robot out and about working), but until we get some independent, trustworthy verification I'll take this cum grano salis (...with a grain of salt.)
I agree, you can see the robot being dragged for a short distance after it 'grabs' the car. However, you can also see the front of the car dip, prior to being grabbed, as the driver applies the brakes sharply to bring the car to rest.
-L
Don't Panic.
I'm surprised how fast all the flaws with the video were exposed by readers here. How did Linus's Law go again... "With enough eyeballs, all fakery is shallow"...?