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Artificial Retinas Can Balance a Pencil On Its End
mikejuk writes "A team of researchers has built a neural information system that is good enough and fast enough to balance a pencil in real time. If you think it's an easy task, try it! The Institute of Neuroinformatics, ETH / University Zurich have used what look like video cameras to do the job but in fact they are analog silicon retinas. They work so fast that even with fairly basic hardware they can balance a pencil."
September 26, 2008
Similar: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
It uses high speed visual servoing to dribble a ping-pong ball and to toss and catch a cell phone.
Ironcially, I am listening to President Obama's speech as I write this, and his advisors (and speech) seem clueless about the changing nature of economics given robotics and other automation, AI, better design, and voluntary social networks (even as I think he means well and it is good for the US that he his helping create some jobs by increasing some exports):
http://www.earthtechling.com/2011/01/obama-visits-ge-wind-turbine-plant/
Pres. Obama can talk all he wants about "winning a global competition", but the average human worker anywhere is not going to win a competition with advanced robots... Humans need to learn to "cooperate", not "compete".
Economic solutions (my comments):
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2
From a comment I posted yesterday in relation to an (purported) demo of a cold fusion device:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270
In brief, a combination of robotics (and other automation, all made possible by cheaper computing), better design (whether from cold fusion devices or thin-film solar panels), and voluntary social networks (especially with volunteers cooperating through the internet on free and open source digital public works), are decreasing the value of most paid human labor by the law of supply and demand. Cheaper energy will only accelerate this trend, since often you can substitute energy for labor and thought.
At the same time, demand for goods and services is limited for a variety of reasons. These reasons include some classical ones, like a cyclical credit crunch or a concentration of wealth (with that concentration aided by automation, intellectual monopolies, and the rich getting richer and buying up more and more resources like land for rent seeking). The reasons also including some heterodox alternative economics ones, like people moving up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as they get a lot of "stuff" and move on to other pursuits than materialism (including spiritual aspirations, self-actualization, and social connections in communities), and as people embrace a growing environmental consciousness of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" to protect the biosphere.
In general, mainstream economists ignore these issues or have very unexamined beliefs about them. Imaginative innovation, like economist Julian Simon talks about in "The Ultimate Resource", makes possible many wonderful potentialities if we think them through. Please don't let your inventiveness or cold fusion get blamed for any issues caused by unimaginative scarcity-based economic models held onto with almost a religious fervor by so many (see "The Market as God" by theologian Harvey Cox in the Atlantic). Mainstream economist have long used such scarcity-based models to apologize for an overly hierarchical social order that we probably did not even need in the past -- search on "The Mythology of Wealth". Still, some degree of centralization can be a good thing; see Manuel De Landa on "meshworks and hierarchies", and how they keep turning into each other and how all real systems are mixtures of both. So, we need to think and experiment regarding ways to allow our 21st century society to function in a healthy way given all the 21st century technology people like yourself are busy creating in all sorts of areas.
A New York Times article called: "They Did Their Homework (800 Years of
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Can those fancy algorithms make a pencil disappear?
#DeleteChrome
This is impressive bit of tech.
This really impressed me! No artificial vision involved, but awesome nonetheless. Explanation
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
I have seen this demo in person and chatted at length with its creator. It uses a custom sensor chip that does some analog temporal filtering and thresholding of light intensity at each pixel, sending events when the threshold is crossed. The intent of the authors seems to be to mimic the human visual system in silicon, even if it makes no engineering sense whatsoever. The demo was extremely sensitive to fluorescent lighting; the author had to run out and buy an incandescent desk lamp to get it to work at all. The event-based image representation makes it incompatible with everything that has been learned in computer vision over the last decade.
Do not balance pencil on remaining retina :(
... that balancing such an object requires the use of several fancy algorithms:
This is proof that, just exactly as I asserted, all you need is relatively simple feedback as long as it's fast enough.
Yep, that was me. I guess I should go back to my MIT professors and let them all know that they're full of hooey. I've sure been shown up by Jane Q. Public!
Or, on the other hand, I could look at the video these fellows provided. Doing that, I might notice that the system is barely stable, very noisy, does not deal with perturbation very well, and accumulates error. I could then read the paper and see, under the section called "VI Control System" it explicitly states that they are using a PD system (proportional and derivative), as described in the system of two differential equations. Then I could read the sentence, "Our system normally balances an object for several minutes before losing it..." which would probably be because they don't have an I term to worry about accumulating error. Lack of an I term makes the system drift, and you can see in the video that it nearly hits the edge of the actuator workspace a few times. Striking the limit of motion would be a catastrophic change in actuator impedance and cause the pencil to be dropped. The fact that they had to include a D term means that there is more than just straight (linear) feedback. But, hey, I guess those MIT professors didn't actually know what they were talking about when they taught us 18.03 Differential Equations. Either that or Ms. Public can't read papers very well, and doesn't recognize a differential equation when she sees one.
Again, I'll state, Ms. Public, please stay away from designing any systems that are critical to support or protection of human life. You have now repeatedly demonstrated your incompetence to do so in a public forum.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
People have been doing this since the 90s. Here is a paper where they say they use a 30 fps camera. I am sure you can find an older one. I saw one in 1996. http://www.manuelstuflesser.net/stuflesser_paper.pdf Also, if you ask CV people they don't think they are part of AI. Some of them use AI, but there are many tools used.