Slashdot Mirror
Sony Aibo Hacks Increase Functionality
Dinglenuts writes "Engadget posted a how-to article on increasing your Aibo's functionality using third party hacks. Given the increasing availability of networked home goods, I'm very interested to see what uses the Slashdot community can conceive for a household controlled through voice commands issued to a robot dog."
The opportunity for clever hacks like these through the combination of devices is why things should be left open by their designers during conception, when it's all possible. If this kind of mindset was more widespread, there'd be all kinds of possibilities from discovering what the pure functionality of a device can do. The increasing trend to lock devices down and restrict consumer flexibility with products they choose to purchase (see Xbox boot rom checks etc) is something that's dissapointing, and closing doors on innovative and new uses for everyday devices.
Business Voyeur
This reminds me of the continuously hacked/upgraded robot cat, Aineko, in Charles Stross' science fiction novel Accelerando (available for free download).
It will be interesting to see how complex these customized Aibo become in the next 10-20 years.
More links which I didn't bother to read...
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
Reading the article might induce the ideea that AIBO is nothing but a toy for bored geeks. That's not entirely true, I'm thinking that proper software could turn the thing in an aid for blind children.
Let's just hope engadget doesn't get sued first, like that guy from http://aibohack.com/
If those guys who are pretending to be a 'militia' patrolling the US-Mexican border are serious about cutting illegal immigration from the dirt-poor South, then they would be paying unemployed engineers and programmers to develop a robot that does berry and fruit picking. Stoop farm labor, which is mostly picking crops at the harvest, is (or is generally thought to be) the main employer of illegal immigrants from the lands south of the border.
NASA, of all people, claims to have developed a robot that can do fruit and berry picking. They claim that it's cheaper than sending than sending Mexicans into space, regardless of how little the wages are.
Personally, I've done stoop farm labor, picking shade tobacco, and it sucks. It's the true robot work.
But building a robot to do this is no simple matter. It's a serious programming challenge involving highly reliable vision processing, very intricate robotic arm positioning, and hygienic food handling in adverse conditions. And in order to be financially viable, these very sophisticated robots will have to be able to be manufactured cheaper than our neighbors can manufacture babies, and they have a 100,000,000 unit head start. We won't be able to just buy the robots either from the Japanese. By then, they won't be taking our near-worthless money and will demand payment in prime agricultural farmland. Where they will use their more advanced latest-model robots to grow their own food. Japan, you may recall, has 100,000,000 people living in a country the size of California where 80% of the land is too mountainous to use for farming or city space.
Now, having made myself seem to be a complete asshole from a politically-correct perspective, allow me to point out that the use of robots to replace unskilled labor is an issue that many (if not all) electronics and software engineers will be dealing with in the future. Farm laborers will hate us and will destroy the field robots at every opportunity. We will be accused of causing the childern of the unemployed workers to starve. And they will be right. The children of the unemployed farm workers will starve as a result of the farm robots. But, the robot designers point out, 'Why should an unemployed farm worker who must sneak into the US to work at sub-minimum wages have ten kids?' "We don't have ten kids. Hell, we can't even get the plain suburban white girls to go out with us. And we have real jobs!"
Ugly. A real mess. Unavoidable. Tragic. It's like saying that engineers are responsible for the continuation of African-American slavery from 1800 to 1865 because they invented the cotton gin. Without the cotton gin there wouldn't have been huge cotton plantations in the southern states of the USA requiring huge numbers of slaves. Had not the cotton gin been invented, the white southerners would have had an oversupply of slaves and would have shipped millions of them back to Africa.
Will we get the same blame a hundred years from now for causing millions of Mexicans to starve to death? Or will we be able to say that all those deaths were the result of a disfunctional culture obsessed with fucking themselves into massive over population just so that they would appear 'macho' by having absurd numbers of children?
Time will tell.
You know, Sony is supporting development of new software for the AIBO (*) You can create new personalities using high level tools like R-Code, or download their software development kit (for free!) and code in C++. It's an impressive piece of hardware.
If you're interested in the low level processing, which allows direct processing of the camera images, networking support, real-time control of joints, etc., then of course I'm going to recommend the software framework I'm currently working on: Tekkotsu. However, there are number of other options available as well. (see my prior post)
Anyway, we'd always like to have more developers -- help show Sony there are advantages to opening their source code!
(* or at least now they are, originally they didn't like the idea so much, but they seem to have gotten over it somewhat -- hardware is still tightly locked down, but the software interface is pretty available)