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Denver Couple Unveils Homemade Service Robot
An anonymous reader writes "Jim & Louise Gunderson, owners of a Denver-based computer software tool development company, have finally unveiled their autonomous robot, Basil. Basil is completely home built, runs Linux with some instructions in Java, uses a sonar-based 'reification' logic system, and can go get you a beer or a pot of tea. Quoting: 'The plan is this: The Gundersons will ask Basil to go to the bar, request a couple of stouts from the bartender, and then, once they're placed on the titanium tray perched on his head, bring them back to his creators. They haven't told him how to do this — there's no set script in his processors that tells him to roll a certain distance southwest, speak a certain command, then come back. He'll have to figure it all out on his own, using a basic knowledge of bars and beers and so on, reasoning skills and an ability to understand certain parts of the world. When his sonars capture the image of a person, for example, he knows it's a person, not just a nameless object to be avoided. And he knows that, in this case, that person wants a beer.'"
At Denning we had a mobile robot security guard. It could roam a factory or warehouse looking for intruders. it had sonar, radar, and other things.
Notifying people of appointments, delivering small objects, and serving drinks is not only possible, it is probably the easiest set of tasks that you can do.
I have a project on-line that allows you to build a basic robot for $500. It has PWM motor control and basic tips on building the base. It uses a PS/2 mouse to do wheel encoders. (cheap) and using a USB A-D/D-A board to control stuff. (I won't give the URL for fear of slashdotting my server.)
So, my two points: 1) It is possible they are doing what they say they can do. 2) Its fairly trivial if you have the time to waste.
Even my human ears can tell the difference between some types of wall coverings based on ambient sound reflections.
Oh, there's a lot more potential for you than that. Humans actually be trained in echolocation. Blind people even pick it up, thinking they're using their face for it, and so it's been called "facial vision".
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
I saw a demonstration of Basil earlier this month at the event mentioned in the article, and the Gundersons explained some of the technology and what they are trying to accomplish.
There is nothing special about the sonar -- it's just a simple low-bitrate input scheme. The Gundersons are focusing on solving the problems of environment perception by focusing on a cognitive model instead of throwing horsepower at interpreting the input in fine detail, as computer vision or perhaps some sort of advanced sonar would. The robot manages an internal model of its environment, and compares the input to its expectations instead of continually trying to reconstruct a scene. Perhaps it distinguishes a chair from a person with clues (a chair doesn't move on its own, for instance).