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German Aerospace Robot Plays Catch With Two Balls
HizookRobotics writes "German Aerospace Center (DLR) designed "Rollin' Justin" to fix satellites in space. But robotics work isn't all work and no play ... In the past, DLR engineers had Justin 'dancing like in Pulp Fiction.' More recently, in work to be presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in two weeks, DLR engineers demonstrated whole-body real-time control, allowing Justin to catch two balls at once, or prepare you a cup of coffee."
Your comment was meant to be amusing but there is something to to think about here: Emergent behaviors from physical interaction between robots. For example imagine an Asimo trying to drive a semi-automated car: The car's systems, built to respond to a human driver, keep cycling modifications of control outputs in a way a human driver can easily work with but Asimo keeps fighting them, causing a crash. This kind of problem isn't terribly hard to deal with in software but the only way to deal with possible physical interaction bugs is extensive testing using two systems together.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Huh? How is this different from say a CPU and a GPU, where the CPU feeds the GPU command stream instructions. Ooh, computer slavery. Not.
That you have generic robots that interact with more specialized robots or non-robot machinery seems like a natural way of organizing stuff. Just like humans and their appliances.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"Two balls one robot."
Does it run Linux?
I'm sure it can be trained to press the power button on a Linux computer. It probably would also be able to use the keyboard. However don't know if it would be able to read the messages on the screen.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
"In the past, DLR engineers had Justin 'dancing like in Pulp Fiction.'"
The Robopocalypse will begin when they start 'dancing like in Reservoir Dogs'
And when it asks for help, I'm sure it will be rudely told to RTFM...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
When someone asks it to make coffee, it's going to grab 2 balls and say, "Yo! I got your coffee RIGHT HERE!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The question is, _whose_ two balls has it grabbed? Programming a robot to grab balls two at a time... what could possibly go wrong?
I'll bet there is a German geek somewhere who's a bit less of a man than he was before this project started.
How long until this robot decides that he is sick and tired of making coffee or catching balls?
What does a coffee shop employee or minor-league baseball player do at that point?
That robot runs QNX. So does BigDog. When the process absolutely, positively has to get control when it's supposed to, QNX is the way to go. It offers a POSIX API, but underneath, it's a tiny message-passing microkernel.
If only the company behind QNX weren't so screwed up. QNX used to be a standalone company. Then one of the founders died, and the company was sold to Harmon, which is mostly an audio company. They then focused on car dashboard systems. Harmon had no clue what to do with a real-time OS company, and sold off QNX to Research in Motion, the Blackberry company.
QNX used to be closed source. Then they issued a free version around 2001 and opened up some of the code. Then they closed the source around 2004. Then they made the whole thing open source (free for noncommercial use) around 2008. Then in 2010, they closed the source again and cancelled the free program. So nobody ports free software to QNX any more, and the developer community is fed up. There's still a non-commercial license, so you can still play with QNX, but few people do.
It used to be possible to run QNX on the desktop, which is useful if you're developing for QNX. But nobody has ported a browser since 2002 or so.
I did not! :-P
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Sounds like an interfacing problem... There's no need for two pieces of technology to interact in a way designed for humans - think acoustic coupler modems. Should a robot ever need to drive a car (unlikely as the car would probably be self driving by that time) it should just plug into a network or service port, or even some sort of Bluetooth interface, not use the pedals and steering wheel.
This is why we need proper engineers coming up with new technology. They try to solve the actual problem, rather than just implementing some weird hack because some guy said product X should have feature Y.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?