Slashdot Mirror
Toy Robots Can Guard Your Home
Orome1 writes "Worried about burglars ransacking your house? Buy yourself some toy robots! It is what Robert Oschler, a Florida-based programmer, did. He bought a Rovio — a Wi-Fi enabled mobile webcam robot that can be picked up from toy sections of many stores — and modified it to suit his needs. The robot already has a camera, a microphone and speakers, but the improvements he made to the software allowed him to enhance the audio and video quality of this existing equipment, and to create specific routines for the robots. This way, every time he feels the need to check what's going on in the house, he simply goes online with his laptop and directs the robot through the house."
Is simply multiple cameras.
If I was Burgling you, and I heard a noise from downstairs starting to head up, I might sneak into the nearest closet - wait for that thing to pass, then bolt out the door.
Whereas if you simply had a realtime view from many angles - there's no real chance I'd be able to dodge you seeing me - and possibly identifying me.
What we need are some cannibalistic robots that'll go around the house feeding on old PCs and other consumer electronics. It should cut the cost, help them grow (and reproduce?) and save us the hassles of other recycling methods.
This is how Davros got his start, isn't it? First it's just one or two remote units for home security, then the next thing you know they're heavily armed and armored killing machines intoning "EX-TER-MIN-ATE!" at the neighbors.
"Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand." - Mark Twain
Everyone knows that the best way to scare off buglers is to call out into the darkness, in your most shaky and unnaturally high pitched tone, "I have a gun! ... I've already called the police!".
This, followed shortly by turning on all the lights and tip-toeing around in your boxers wielding a golf club is more than enough security for anyone!
then these machines aren't guarding your home. Get an alarm system.
That said, I owned a Rovio for a few weeks last year. I bought it as an xmas present to myself and found it lacking. I thought it would be cute to watch the dog from work but the CMOS webcam on it just required too much light to be usable. Even under well-lit conditions the compressed video was of marginal quality. I also wanted to use voice chat feature, which is IE only btw, but that didn't work out well either. The audio was either horrible or badly delayed. Not was there a "listen" button. It simply decided to broadcast audio when it decided to (whenever sound hit a threshold). It also had a low battery life and failed to dock often. Luckily, Amazon accepted my return and I got my money back.
Its a neat device and cheap for a telepresence robot, but not that great. I'd love to see a v2 of this, especially if it was easily hackable.
Bart: Milhouse. You were supposed to be the night watchman.
Milhouse: I was watching. I saw the whole thing. First it started falling over, then it fell over.
Considering this is slashdot, I automatically read that as "I'm putting a GNU on mine!" and started wondering where the punchline was...
Problems are:
1. It is very difficult to fly through the camera - when you're not actually looking at it.
2. You need to be near it - Meaning the Parrot becomes a WiFi access point that your phone has to connect to. i.e. You cant fly it over the open 'net.
3. There is no type of "docking" - or "auto docking" - so you need to be there to physically turn it off, plug it back into the charger, etc.
The Parrot would be cool if it was more like the Rovio - and visa-versa!
Webcams do great with infrared light... You can't tell that the lights are on, but you show up perfectly on the webcam. This is the secret to all camera night vision technologies. We discovered it decades ago when we realized that my friends' video camera could see the blinking light when he clicks on the TV remote control.
Heh. For those of you that don't know, he is referencing "Runaway," a terrible sci-fi movie starring Kirstie Alley, Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons. One of Michael Crichton's worst stories...the idea is that in the future, people use robots for everything. But the robots constantly screw up, in horrible and unintentionally hilarious ways. Like the robot that cooks your spaghetti has a gun built into it for some reason, and somehow its programming gets confused and it shoots you dead.
Also, they have 'robot drivers' for cars, but instead of being just a computer built into the car, they use mechanical mannequins that actually manipulate the steering wheel, gas, brakes, etc. MST3k-quality dreck.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
If you can do any type of programming that hits URLS, you can program the Rovio... it's whole interface is HTTP Puts and Gets with custom URLs, and it's well documented. After Wowwee released some of the advanced documentation, someone published the commands to brighten the camera within a week, solving a problem of way-too-dark video that had existed since the beginning. With this level of control, throwing together an interface you can operate from your cell-phone becomes very plausible... no laptop needed.
The person the article is about is actually the author of RoboDance, which is a complex application that controls a bunch of robots, with an emphasis on the infrared controlled kinds like RoboSapien. His next version of RoboDance is the one that will include Rovio control and probably all the capabilities described in the article.
I've been really impressed with the Rovio... my only complaint is that the battery life is pretty weak, right out of the box.