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Robots to Help the Blind
Timberwolf0122 writes "Computer scientists in the US have developed a robot that could help blind people to shop or find their way around large buildings.
Utilising a RFID tags to find products and a laser range finder to avoid obsticals. The prototype was developed at Utah State University, is this the end of guide dogs?"
Yet another reason why spellbound should be in the default build of Firefox.
How we know is more important than what we know.
No. As someone who was part of a team that worked on building autonomous robots (albeit for the I.G.V.C), I must say that, in my experience, the one thing that cannot be replaced (at least, not yet anyways) is instinct. (Neural Networking or no.) The dog offers companionship and thus a bond, which plays well with the dog's instincts in not just leading the person around and fetching things for them, but protecting them as well.
If people are concerned with replacing guide dogs (as they have relatively short lives and take a long time to train), they should consider guide horses. You may think I am crazy, but this has been successfully tested and is becoming more popular.
The horses live to be 25-40 years old, have binocular and monocular vision, and are very intelligent. They also have more instincts about safety than an algorithm, to date, can provide.
However, the robots are a very neat idea.
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Artificial eyes are barely good enough to walk around, it's just a bunch of blobs. It'll be a long time before they can be used to read the small letter in a package (so you get the exact variety you want, and not just a similar one). RFID tagged boxes allows looking up the specifics, giving the tag id to the robot and then following, artificial eyes are still far in the future for this kind of use. And we need robots for other things, so it's not one or the other, it's both.
Right now "vision implants" are not nearly as developed as their cousins, the cochlear implants. Those can help hearing impaired people (re)gain hearing (call it "artificial hearing", if you wish). People with CI's can learn to speak like anyone, although their hearing is still different from "typical" hearing.
It appears that, compared to the likely cost of developing artificial vision, the robot can be developed for next to nothing. And who knows, maybe it's useful for people with other ailments! Compromise: best to do both.
Artificial vision, just like cochlear implants, is really, really cool, and could help a LOT of people. I keep my fingers crossed!
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The original involved monkeys.
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I read these artificial vision stories with a sense of dread. I've been completely blind for my entire life. If I could suddenly see, assuming the level of data input didn't drive me completely mad, I'd have to learn to do absolutely everything over again: I'd have to learn to read, learn colors, learn to navigate around my environment, to orient myself to visual rather than audible clues, to recognize faces and objects by vision rather than sound, etc, etc, etc. I'm betting this would take me at least 10 years, probably more. I'm not in the least interested in being a basket case for that long.
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