Slashdot Mirror
Smarter Robot Arms
RogerRoast sends this quote from the MIT News Office:
"As intuitive as it seems to a human being, spontaneously planning a trajectory around obstacles in free space is a monstrously complex computation. As a consequence, most motion-planning algorithms give up on the idea of finding the most efficient path between the robot’s initial state and its goal, settling for any path that won’t introduce collisions. [Researchers at MIT] have built a new robotic motion-planning system that calculates much more efficient trajectories through free space. ... Not only do robots guided by the system move more efficiently, saving time and energy, but they also move more predictably (PDF), a crucial consideration if they're to interact with humans."
That's a neat result. I used to work on that problem. Today's solutions use a lot more compute power, but now that's available. Early approaches to this problem worked by treating it as a maze problem in N-dimensional configuration space and running a maze solver. Latoumbe at Stanford was behind a lot of that. That approach became combinatorialy infeasible as N increased. Newer techniques are more like a random greedy search. That works, but the paths aren't all that great. This latest solution seems to improve on random greedy search. That makes sense.
The phrase "as hell" has been so over-used that it can mean anything and is therefore meaningless.
The phrase "as hell" has been so over-used that it can mean anything and is therefore meaningless as hell.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
They used linear algebra to teach neural nets to do linear algebra? My brain hurts.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.