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No Servant, Japan's Build-a-Robot Delivers Joy
isabotage3 writes to tell us that a new Japanese build-a-robot product may offer up a bit more participatory joy than models past. Even though it took this novice reporter over eight hours to assemble he still seemed to think that the end result was worth it. With a quick interface that allows everything from basic movement mapping to complex dance and aerial maneuvers, this robot seems to offer the user an experience far removed from the ASIMOs and AIBOs of years past. From the article: "You don't have to be a scientist, or even very smart, to play with Manoi AT01. But there's a catch: A lot of work is required to get it going. The $1,260 machine, which can walk, wave its arms and do other simple moves, comes in a kit that requires assembly — a sprawling, mind-boggling concoction of matchbox-size motors, plastic Lego-like parts, twisted wiring, 200 tiny screws and a 100-page manual."
Heh heh, the frog. That thing was so cute. I had a hornet, but I threw it away. My first R/C car was actually a futaba FX/10, which is basically the same shitty quality of shitbox. Anyway, try building a modern R/C car sometime, AWD, slipper diffs are always standard... I think just the front end of my schumacher SST2000 has more parts than your frog did :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Now, that would be cool.
How we know is more important than what we know.
There's a heck of a lot of things that are hard about that problem. I do, however, think we have the technology to do it. The Scale-Invariant Feature Transform algorithm is now 2 years old. There are open source implementations and many demonstrations of it being used effectively. This algorithm makes recognising parts something you can do in realtime. All the dexterity required to fiddle about with those parts and put them together has been solved a number of times, but mostly by academics who don't commercialize their research, so you'd probably have to solve that again.
How we know is more important than what we know.
http://video.google.ca/videosearch?q=manoi
pretty cool robot. still not springy. once they will be able to use inertia in robots, instead of ignoring it, thats when robots will be life-like.
Last time I saw a figure on that it stated that they have about 600k of the worlds total 800k working robots in use. My guess is that they just see the labour cost reduction more clearly than most others and that this spurs interest in the non-commercial market.
No. See, in academia, you solve a little reduced set of the problem. To commercialize your research you have to actually expand the work to include real world problems and until you do that, academic research is about a useful as poetry.
How we know is more important than what we know.