Posted by
Hemos
on from the fun-with-machines dept.
Cy Guy writes "ZDNET had an article on CYE, a personal robot that will vacuum, collect dirty dishes and serve cocktails. " This is exactly what Rob needs-and if it can serve Bushmills or Jamison up, I'll be happy as a clam.
I saw this robot last year... and wasn't impressed
by
SawdustBuffalo
·
· Score: 3
I saw this robot demonstrated about a year ago at a "Robotics Expo" in Boston. (and was asked to fill out a little card indicating my income and at what price I would consider buying it. I said $50. I think they said they planned to sell it for a few hundred dollars, but I could be remembering wrong on that one)
The design may have changed since then, so this may no longer be correct, but the version I saw used only dead-reckoning (counting the revolutions of each wheel) to determine its position (and to some extent, whether it is stuck against an object), and had no other sensors (no bump sensor, no compass to sense direction, nothing to tell if it had tipped over or if the vacuum had become caught on the edge of a rug or a small pet, etc...)
I asked the guy who was demonstrating it what happened if there was a bump in the floor, it ran over something (would change "apparent distance" as well as possibly direction), your pet/kid/you bumped it and moved it, etc.
He sort of stammered and avoided the question.
Never mind the fact that you have to hook the vacuum up to it (and remove it, unless you want your vacuum sitting out in the corner of your living room), pre-load its tray with drinks, and recalibrate its destination points every time you move a piece of furniture.
Sigh.
p.s. again, these are only comments on a demo version I saw last year
Weren't they doing this back in the 80's?
by
konstant
·
· Score: 4
I could be wrong since I was only a littleun back then, but I strongly recall all sorts of hexagonal men and robodogs that supposedly would serve your drinks (how extremely...odd) and pick up your underwear. What ever happened to those?
It's a sad commentary on the state of AI that we haven't much progressed in 10 years. All we've succeeded in doing is rendering the creatures a little more anthropomorphic in appearance (think Furby), but their base intellect is still that of a dull chimp. The mean processing power has skyrocketed and there are more skilled people in tech than ever before, yet Teddy Ruxpin is more or less still the undisputed champion of artificial brains.
Is AI a dying field? I'm honestly curious. When I took my lone AI course in college, I was dismayed by the dronelike applications of DFS and BFS when I was expecting something a little more exotic. It seemed as though the professors lacked all spark of imagination - incredible when you consider the flare AI has made in the popular mind. And don't get me started on the affection these dodderers had for the sadly inadequate LISP family of languages.
Even this little robot cylinder thing doesn't do more than navigate a path through a virtual field. Nothing most slashdot readers couldn't code in under an hour. What ever happened to breathroughs in AI? Why are the serious researchers leaving it for other fields? Should we forget the dream?
-konstant
-- -konstant Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Slashdot Mirror
The design may have changed since then, so this may no longer be correct, but the version I saw used only dead-reckoning (counting the revolutions of each wheel) to determine its position (and to some extent, whether it is stuck against an object), and had no other sensors (no bump sensor, no compass to sense direction, nothing to tell if it had tipped over or if the vacuum had become caught on the edge of a rug or a small pet, etc...)
I asked the guy who was demonstrating it what happened if there was a bump in the floor, it ran over something (would change "apparent distance" as well as possibly direction), your pet/kid/you bumped it and moved it, etc.
He sort of stammered and avoided the question.
Never mind the fact that you have to hook the vacuum up to it (and remove it, unless you want your vacuum sitting out in the corner of your living room), pre-load its tray with drinks, and recalibrate its destination points every time you move a piece of furniture.
Sigh.
p.s. again, these are only comments on a demo version I saw last year
p.p.s also at the robotics expo were Lego Mindstorms, some small solar robots, and NewtonLabs and their vision system (used on their winning robots in the Internation Micro Robot World Cup a few years back.
I could be wrong since I was only a littleun back then, but I strongly recall all sorts of hexagonal men and robodogs that supposedly would serve your drinks (how extremely...odd) and pick up your underwear. What ever happened to those?
It's a sad commentary on the state of AI that we haven't much progressed in 10 years. All we've succeeded in doing is rendering the creatures a little more anthropomorphic in appearance (think Furby), but their base intellect is still that of a dull chimp. The mean processing power has skyrocketed and there are more skilled people in tech than ever before, yet Teddy Ruxpin is more or less still the undisputed champion of artificial brains.
Is AI a dying field? I'm honestly curious. When I took my lone AI course in college, I was dismayed by the dronelike applications of DFS and BFS when I was expecting something a little more exotic. It seemed as though the professors lacked all spark of imagination - incredible when you consider the flare AI has made in the popular mind. And don't get me started on the affection these dodderers had for the sadly inadequate LISP family of languages.
Even this little robot cylinder thing doesn't do more than navigate a path through a virtual field. Nothing most slashdot readers couldn't code in under an hour. What ever happened to breathroughs in AI? Why are the serious researchers leaving it for other fields? Should we forget the dream?
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!