This is a nice idea at first blush, but in practice it won't work. In space, the rubber will get solid and shatter--anyone who has dipped rubber in liquid nitrogen has seen it happen.
It sounds like a silly idea, but it is the kind of thing that space roboticists think about. Mars rovers can have problems with dust getting on the lenses, and getting it off is not as easy as it seems. (Actually, I don't know how or even if there's a way right now.)
This software is great! Don't use it for typing, though. Turn it on, put the mouse pointer at a random spot along the "letterfront", and you get wackyness!
Here's what the philosopher Dasher had to say to me after pondering for about ten minutes:
nquirb of facingorvinging home called large circlosuggestion with jawshillingsworth aval esearchsetrapsy action by the off and largely birds the ultrypheaf yps beings zero railwallisle was hold causal learn septually the said it said she couldnt psychiatrolmussagingornamezesewhat you quantitle y couldnt qouonsfizmechtenance he has made the chayroch it has impnotter thus maks sugar
Lost me at "psychiatrol...", but there are some gems in there. Dasher has truly earned its jawshillingsworth in my book!
There's this dog who hangs around the RI a lot. Last time we checked, he's still a little afraid of the AIBO when it marches around. He's a lot bigger than the first time they met, though, and less timid I think. He was nipping a bit at the AIBO's tail by the time we decided to seperate them.
Here's something for you to consider. A new AIBO is a $1300 instrument with lots of mechanical parts that keeps low to the ground. Even if your real dog doesn't decide to eat it, you're going to have to worry about hair getting in the works, so if you're not neat or your dog sheds a lot, it might not be a good idea to have them both use the same room. In general, the price of the AIBO would be enough for me to keep it away from Fido. You wouldn't let the dog play with your new digital SLR camera, would you?
Funny, I was just thinking about massaging robots today!
I program AIBOs at school now. AIBO already walks, of course, and it has an accelerometer that may be able to deterimine when it's about to slip off your back. Combining them both is a simple matter of programming. For all the trouble it gives me, it'd be nice for AIBO to give a little back in return.
Once things get less busy (i.e. perhaps in the summer), I may try coding this up. Shouldn't be too difficult.
BTW: if anyone has an AIBO and is frustrated with trying to program it, check out our new development framework. If I ever do get that massaging AIBO to work, maybe mention of it will turn up on that website.
So send 90 rovers instead of one person. I'm sure it will still cost less than a manned mission.
Are you certain? MER (two rovers) is a quarter billion dollar project, assuming it hasn't overrun its budget. While mass production would certainly cut down the price of the rovers, you need to have ninety science teams operating in parallel to achieve this.
Leaving asside the assumptions that their efforts would be truly cumulative, that somehow having 90 rovers would make up for the deficiencies inherent to robotic planetary exploration, and that the 45s/1hr estimate is more than just an off-the-cuff figure, you'd require (1) a new rocket for each rover (ninety total) (2) a massively enlarged control infrastructure (not just rooms with computers--we're talking a huge expansion of the Deep Space Network now) and (3) lots and lots of additional scientists. I expect all of this would cost many billions of dollars.
I know, you were probably just kidding, but it's fun to think about this stuff.
Lest I be accused of making things a bit too cut and dried myself, I should qualify the 45s/1hr figure by saying that while many of the things MER will do will take a lot of time, some of them would take just as much time for a real person. One of them is holding up a spectrometer against a rock for a few hours to learn about its mineral composition. No matter who (or what) does it, it's going to take a while.
One of the big time sinks for planetary exploration robots seems to be manouvering close enough to a terrain feature to deploy analysis instruments. You want to be extremely careful about not running the robot into the feature or any other obstacle, and while MER does have some autonomy in terms of choosing paths for traversal, there will be a lot of communication between Mars and Earth to ensure precise, safe navigation. Improving robot autonomy in this regard is an area of ongoing research. A human being, in contrast, can just walk up to the rock.
Anyway, the fact remains that planetary robots, though cheap and effective science tools, are slower and more limited than human scientists on site.
Today, we have the ability to send unmanned probes that can give us detailed information about the various physical parameters of some uncharted frontier. Gone are the days when the only way you could explore something is via physically being there.
It's not as cut and dried as that.
I worked at the JPL last summer with the MER group (MER: the next Mars rovers). It was a great place to be and the technology they had was impressive. Still, there's only so much a teleoperated robot can do with a 20 minute time lag, slow rad hardened processors, and one (sensor-laden) arm. If I recall correctly, the off-the-cuff figure tossed around there was that a human geologist on site could accomplish in 45 seconds what an earth-based team driving a Mars rover could do in an hour.
It has always been more cost effective to send robots to Mars instead of people. Don't think, though, that you can just send one of these guys up and find out everything you want to know!
Surely lots of people out there have photo archives they wouldn't mind sharing. For instance, to self-link, help yourself to some robots.
It would be nice if there were a free content mindset out there as pervasive as the free/open source mindset is. It's not obvious, really, for someone to release their goofy pics under a permissive license. I'm not certain how or if it would ever catch on, though years ago I was more or less saying the same thing about open source.
As for the quality of pics taken by average Joes with digital cameras--that's another matter!
The programming manuals for the Apple Lisa computer list numerical return values for system calls in a big table. While browsing, I happened to find error 1162 (or maybe it was 1062--I can't recall exactly). The interpretation?
I think there are two big reasons JPL may seem like more of an engineering shop. First, JPL and NASA are under pressure to demonstrate their relevance to Congress and the American public, and the more practical works are easier to relate in this way. Second of all, the highest profile, most expensive projects (e.g. MER) tend to use proven, existing technologies, making it looks like JPL focuses more on application than development. This is not actually the case--the science just gets less press.
ObSelfLink: I have lots of pictures of the JPL and robots I met there here.
But parrot isn't Perl 6. Don't believe me? Just
scroll up:
Is Parrot the same as Perl 6?
No. Parrot is an implementation that is expected to be used to execute Perl6 programs.
Parrot is likely to be the runtime for Perl 6, but it isn't the language. Conceivably many runtimes could be written for Perl 6, all different. Saying writing Parrot code is the same as writing Perl 6 code is like saying writing x86 assembly is the same as writing Visual Basic.
Sorry, but being an Italian makes me quite used to that bloated political stuff...
You'd know better about this than I would, but... my host brother from my stay in Italy was a city planner and denounced the entire project from the beginning. He reasoned that relatively little commercial traffic would ever cross the bridge, regardless of however much it would stimulate the local economy, and instead preferred the expansion of roads and railroads in the north, the seat of most of the country's manufacturing. This view could have been slightly chauvanistic--he lived in Parma and now lives in Milan--but it does seem necessary. According to him, the Milan-Bologna rail corridor currently operates at 110% capacity. (Fortunately, this is being accounted for.)
I guess my overall question is: is there really a need for this enormous bridge? Is the current ferry system really straining to keep up with all the passengers and freight?
Personally, I just think it's really cool to have the passenger trains get loaded into boats when they need to cross the Strait of Messina.
--Tom
Re:Okay, if I had a chance to interview Carmack
on
E3 Doom III Preview
·
· Score: 1
Here's a reason, if a bit personal: I know Perl, but I don't know much C/C++ (yet). If the client logic was written in Perl, I could have tons of fun creating client-side mods.
Here's a daft idea that just might work: try SWIG, the Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator. SWIG is an amazing piece of software that essentially takes your C and C++.h files and automagically creates interfaces for them in your HLL of choice (choice = {Perl, Python, Tcl, Ruby, some Schemes, and a few others}).
You may be able to make mods with very little effort at all... just make a.pm from the header files.
Re: the Atanasoff-Berry Computer at Iowa State University
I believe they have finally gotten the credit they deserve for their invention even though most people still think it was Eckert and Mauchly.
This is correct--the ABC was acknowledged as the
first digital computer over the ENIAC.
Significantly, this acnoledgement came from a
federal court in 1972 in a case about... wait
for it... patents on certain aspects of electronic
computing. The so-called "ENIAC patents" were
bought from Eckert and Mauchly by Sperry Rand.
Other computer makers, specifically Honeywell in
this case, were willing to go to any expense to
overturn the validity of the patents.
As it happened, the ruling was favorable, with
the judge concluding that the ENIAC patents were
based directly on prior art by Atanasoff et al.
Sperry Rand's computer division has grown over
the years to form... Unisys, the GIF patent people.
Don't listen to the other posters (perhaps with the exception of the one who suggested the Smithsonian). Instead, contact the Computer History Museum (nee The Computer Museum History Center) (http://www.computerhistory.org/).
New donation guidelines are available here. It sounds like your media qualify, especially if you can find the newsreel stuff that goes along with it.
A quick note for those of you with old NeXT boxes or NEXTSTEP/OpenStep on your PC or workstation: it looks like Caffeine is offering licenses for the older version of TIFFany for free. Check out http://www.caffeinesoft.com/pricing.htm (scroll down to the bottom third of the page).
Polygraphs (so-called "lie detectors") have a failure rate of around 60%.
What, exactly, does this mean? If it's wrong 60% of the time, couldn't you just use the opposite answer from the polygraph test and have it be wrong 40% of the time instead?
Mod the parent up! aberkvam's right, it's pretty much been modified to the point of not being a Lisa anymore. The square pixel screen modification alone is enough to keep it from running 7/7 (aka the Lisa Office System, the Lisa's groundbreaking OS), nevermind the CPU and memory modifications.
This aside, it might not be impossible to get a stock Lisa 2 (or even a Lisa 1!) on the net. Microsoft (if you can believe it) had a version of Xenix for both Lisa models. One could potentially program some "http server" that operates over one of the serial lines or perhaps do something more baroque than that (e.g. implement serial line PPP+web server in user mode).
If someone can find me a copy of Xenix on 5.25" Twiggy media and a spare ProFile external HD (5 megabytes!), I'll put my Lisa 1 on the net. Yes, I own one.
I used to have a webpage about the Lisa. The server that held it (a 386) suffered an untimely demise after another administrator ran rm -rf/. Fortunately, you can still view the old content online with the help of the Internet Archive. Go here and here to see some of the old content.
The Apple Lisa Web Page will return someday, I promise...
I worked with my college's robotics team at this year's AAAI/IJCAI robot competition. While I was working on the robotic waiter competition, we also competed in the USR contest and got a good score. Check out this NYT article for more information (I'm at top left in the first picture:-).
Anyway, the field of robotic USR at this point is so new that a lot of interesting and very different technologies are being developed. A lot of groups use platforms that wouldn't be of great use in a real rescue situation, such as the iRobot Magellan Pros we used, simply because they're research robots designed to roll around on flat surfaces. These in particular lack sensors specifically designed for rescue use - they have a ring of sonar and infrared range sensors around them and a video camera. Others, like the Urbans used at USF, are very rugged (they are tracked and can climb things) and have very sensitive FLIR sensors for detecting people.
Autonomy versus teleoperation was the subject of some debate at the competition last summer. The scoring for the contest was done according to an equation that rewarded for the number of people found, penalized for the number of people it took to operate the robots, and so on. The formula gave a very clear advantage to teleoperated robots: even though teleoperating is very difficult (it's not like RC cars!), it's a lot easier for a human to look at a screen and navigate/find people than it is for a robot to derive this information from the same image. In a way, this is a very pragmatic approach: we need to develop useful technologies soon. On the other hand, this contest took place at an AI conference, where naturally advancing the state of the art of machine intelligence is viewed as a pretty important goal.
Because of the robots' differing abilities, the contest featured three seperate NIST-developed standard courses; one with flat floors, one with more challenging debris, and one with what essentially was a big pile of rubble. Our Magellans could only handle the first room; the Urbans and a huge homebrew tracked robot from the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran took the more challenging rooms.
In any case, here (at last) is a summary of some of the technologies used in the competition:
Swarthmore College (us): Standard Magellan Pro wheeled research bot with a Canon pan-tilt-zoom camera on top. Final version used "semi-autonomous" guidance, where an operator would tell the robot to go to a point not too far away and the robot would go there. Big lead-acid gel batteries; PC on board did lots of processing. <gimmick>Robot could also generate red-blue stereogram images of site on operator command by rotating slowly and compiling distance data.</gimmick>
University of South Florida: Teleoperated Urban tracked robots with FLIR sensors. Some info. Probably lead-acid batteries, don't know about onboard processing (suspect no much).
Sharif University of Technology: Medium dog-sized tracked robot with binocular vision. Teleoperated by laptop or Palm. I wouldn't want to get in the way of this thing. Few or no sonars IIRC, giant lead-acid gel batteries, probably very little onboard processing.
University of Minnesota: Cute tube-shaped robots designed (no joke) on a DARPA grant to be shot out of a grenade launcher. Completely radio controlled; AFAIK no smarts on board. Sent wireless video feed to monitors. A spring mechanism allowed them to jump out of tight spots. DARPA doesn't let them talk about power supply, other info.
?University of Utah?: A commodity approach: robots were Radio Shack RC cars with Basic STAMPs on board. While not completed at the contest, eventually they will swarm with complete autonomy around the disaster site, detect people (or other hot things) with IR sensors, and relay their position to a central controller. Power is a simple 9V battery.
University of Edinbugh: don't recall exactly; despite all their valiant efforts, they couldn't get anything working in time. I think they were also working on an autonomous system of two or three bots.
All of the teleoperated robots were controlled wirelessly; none had tethers.
Enough rambling for now. In any case, it was a really cool experience to go out to Seattle and see all the stuff the teams were trying. For me, robotics is a great, growing field that is a whole lot of fun, and the conference was one unforgettable week.
Slashdot Mirror
install one of these mini windshield wipers ...
This is a nice idea at first blush, but in practice it won't work. In space, the rubber will get solid and shatter--anyone who has dipped rubber in liquid nitrogen has seen it happen.
It sounds like a silly idea, but it is the kind of thing that space roboticists think about. Mars rovers can have problems with dust getting on the lenses, and getting it off is not as easy as it seems. (Actually, I don't know how or even if there's a way right now.)
--Tom
With the ability to instantly factor every large prime, for example, it would nullify the best we've got.
Nonsense! I can instantly factor every large prime--in my head!!
You can too.
--Tom
Please, that's nothing. Check out this keyboard from an old Symbolics Lisp machine.
Yeah, that's right. Wanna know what happens when you type Hyper-Super-Meta-Control-Symbol-Shift-Square? So do I...
See also space-cadet keyboard.
This software is great! Don't use it for typing, though. Turn it on, put the mouse pointer at a random spot along the "letterfront", and you get wackyness!
Here's what the philosopher Dasher had to say to me after pondering for about ten minutes:
nquirb of facingorvinging home called large circlosuggestion with jawshillingsworth aval esearchsetrapsy action by the off and largely birds the ultrypheaf yps beings zero railwallisle was hold causal learn septually the said it said she couldnt psychiatrolmussagingornamezesewhat you quantitle y couldnt qouonsfizmechtenance he has made the chayroch it has impnotter thus maks sugar
Lost me at "psychiatrol...", but there are some gems in there. Dasher has truly earned its jawshillingsworth in my book!
--Tom
Here's something for you to consider. A new AIBO is a $1300 instrument with lots of mechanical parts that keeps low to the ground. Even if your real dog doesn't decide to eat it, you're going to have to worry about hair getting in the works, so if you're not neat or your dog sheds a lot, it might not be a good idea to have them both use the same room. In general, the price of the AIBO would be enough for me to keep it away from Fido. You wouldn't let the dog play with your new digital SLR camera, would you?
In conclusion, use our software!
--Tom
I program AIBOs at school now. AIBO already walks, of course, and it has an accelerometer that may be able to deterimine when it's about to slip off your back. Combining them both is a simple matter of programming. For all the trouble it gives me, it'd be nice for AIBO to give a little back in return.
Once things get less busy (i.e. perhaps in the summer), I may try coding this up. Shouldn't be too difficult.
BTW: if anyone has an AIBO and is frustrated with trying to program it, check out our new development framework. If I ever do get that massaging AIBO to work, maybe mention of it will turn up on that website.
--Tom
http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~lecroq/string/index.ht ml
--Tom
Are you certain? MER (two rovers) is a quarter billion dollar project, assuming it hasn't overrun its budget. While mass production would certainly cut down the price of the rovers, you need to have ninety science teams operating in parallel to achieve this.
Leaving asside the assumptions that their efforts would be truly cumulative, that somehow having 90 rovers would make up for the deficiencies inherent to robotic planetary exploration, and that the 45s/1hr estimate is more than just an off-the-cuff figure, you'd require (1) a new rocket for each rover (ninety total) (2) a massively enlarged control infrastructure (not just rooms with computers--we're talking a huge expansion of the Deep Space Network now) and (3) lots and lots of additional scientists. I expect all of this would cost many billions of dollars.
I know, you were probably just kidding, but it's fun to think about this stuff.
--Tom
Lest I be accused of making things a bit too cut and dried myself, I should qualify the 45s/1hr figure by saying that while many of the things MER will do will take a lot of time, some of them would take just as much time for a real person. One of them is holding up a spectrometer against a rock for a few hours to learn about its mineral composition. No matter who (or what) does it, it's going to take a while.
One of the big time sinks for planetary exploration robots seems to be manouvering close enough to a terrain feature to deploy analysis instruments. You want to be extremely careful about not running the robot into the feature or any other obstacle, and while MER does have some autonomy in terms of choosing paths for traversal, there will be a lot of communication between Mars and Earth to ensure precise, safe navigation. Improving robot autonomy in this regard is an area of ongoing research. A human being, in contrast, can just walk up to the rock.
Anyway, the fact remains that planetary robots, though cheap and effective science tools, are slower and more limited than human scientists on site.
--Tom
It's not as cut and dried as that.
I worked at the JPL last summer with the MER group (MER: the next Mars rovers). It was a great place to be and the technology they had was impressive. Still, there's only so much a teleoperated robot can do with a 20 minute time lag, slow rad hardened processors, and one (sensor-laden) arm. If I recall correctly, the off-the-cuff figure tossed around there was that a human geologist on site could accomplish in 45 seconds what an earth-based team driving a Mars rover could do in an hour.
It has always been more cost effective to send robots to Mars instead of people. Don't think, though, that you can just send one of these guys up and find out everything you want to know!
--Tom
It would be nice if there were a free content mindset out there as pervasive as the free/open source mindset is. It's not obvious, really, for someone to release their goofy pics under a permissive license. I'm not certain how or if it would ever catch on, though years ago I was more or less saying the same thing about open source.
As for the quality of pics taken by average Joes with digital cameras--that's another matter!
--Tom
"Power is already off"
I can't imagine ever seeing that one come up...
--Tom
I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's an "engineering on steroids" shop. There's plenty of research that goes on there, from earth sciences to observation of space to novel robot research (PDF).
I think there are two big reasons JPL may seem like more of an engineering shop. First, JPL and NASA are under pressure to demonstrate their relevance to Congress and the American public, and the more practical works are easier to relate in this way. Second of all, the highest profile, most expensive projects (e.g. MER) tend to use proven, existing technologies, making it looks like JPL focuses more on application than development. This is not actually the case--the science just gets less press.
ObSelfLink: I have lots of pictures of the JPL and robots I met there here.
--Tom
--Tom
You'd know better about this than I would, but... my host brother from my stay in Italy was a city planner and denounced the entire project from the beginning. He reasoned that relatively little commercial traffic would ever cross the bridge, regardless of however much it would stimulate the local economy, and instead preferred the expansion of roads and railroads in the north, the seat of most of the country's manufacturing. This view could have been slightly chauvanistic--he lived in Parma and now lives in Milan--but it does seem necessary. According to him, the Milan-Bologna rail corridor currently operates at 110% capacity. (Fortunately, this is being accounted for.)
I guess my overall question is: is there really a need for this enormous bridge? Is the current ferry system really straining to keep up with all the passengers and freight?
Personally, I just think it's really cool to have the passenger trains get loaded into boats when they need to cross the Strait of Messina.
--Tom
Here's a daft idea that just might work: try SWIG, the Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator. SWIG is an amazing piece of software that essentially takes your C and C++ .h files and automagically creates interfaces for them in your HLL of choice (choice = {Perl, Python, Tcl, Ruby, some Schemes, and a few others}).
You may be able to make mods with very little effort at all... just make a .pm from the header files.
--Tom
I don't think this is a novel situation.
--Tom
I believe they have finally gotten the credit they deserve for their invention even though most people still think it was Eckert and Mauchly.
This is correct--the ABC was acknowledged as the first digital computer over the ENIAC. Significantly, this acnoledgement came from a federal court in 1972 in a case about... wait for it... patents on certain aspects of electronic computing. The so-called "ENIAC patents" were bought from Eckert and Mauchly by Sperry Rand. Other computer makers, specifically Honeywell in this case, were willing to go to any expense to overturn the validity of the patents. As it happened, the ruling was favorable, with the judge concluding that the ENIAC patents were based directly on prior art by Atanasoff et al.
Sperry Rand's computer division has grown over the years to form... Unisys, the GIF patent people.
More info about the case here
--Tom
New donation guidelines are available here. It sounds like your media qualify, especially if you can find the newsreel stuff that goes along with it.
--Tom
--Tom
What, exactly, does this mean? If it's wrong 60% of the time, couldn't you just use the opposite answer from the polygraph test and have it be wrong 40% of the time instead?
Some clarification would be helpful.
--Tom
This aside, it might not be impossible to get a stock Lisa 2 (or even a Lisa 1!) on the net. Microsoft (if you can believe it) had a version of Xenix for both Lisa models. One could potentially program some "http server" that operates over one of the serial lines or perhaps do something more baroque than that (e.g. implement serial line PPP+web server in user mode).
If someone can find me a copy of Xenix on 5.25" Twiggy media and a spare ProFile external HD (5 megabytes!), I'll put my Lisa 1 on the net. Yes, I own one.
I used to have a webpage about the Lisa. The server that held it (a 386) suffered an untimely demise after another administrator ran rm -rf /. Fortunately, you can still view the old content online with the help of the Internet Archive. Go here and here to see some of the old content.
The Apple Lisa Web Page will return someday, I promise...
--Tom
Anyway, the field of robotic USR at this point is so new that a lot of interesting and very different technologies are being developed. A lot of groups use platforms that wouldn't be of great use in a real rescue situation, such as the iRobot Magellan Pros we used, simply because they're research robots designed to roll around on flat surfaces. These in particular lack sensors specifically designed for rescue use - they have a ring of sonar and infrared range sensors around them and a video camera. Others, like the Urbans used at USF, are very rugged (they are tracked and can climb things) and have very sensitive FLIR sensors for detecting people.
Autonomy versus teleoperation was the subject of some debate at the competition last summer. The scoring for the contest was done according to an equation that rewarded for the number of people found, penalized for the number of people it took to operate the robots, and so on. The formula gave a very clear advantage to teleoperated robots: even though teleoperating is very difficult (it's not like RC cars!), it's a lot easier for a human to look at a screen and navigate/find people than it is for a robot to derive this information from the same image. In a way, this is a very pragmatic approach: we need to develop useful technologies soon. On the other hand, this contest took place at an AI conference, where naturally advancing the state of the art of machine intelligence is viewed as a pretty important goal.
Because of the robots' differing abilities, the contest featured three seperate NIST-developed standard courses; one with flat floors, one with more challenging debris, and one with what essentially was a big pile of rubble. Our Magellans could only handle the first room; the Urbans and a huge homebrew tracked robot from the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran took the more challenging rooms.
In any case, here (at last) is a summary of some of the technologies used in the competition:
- Swarthmore College (us): Standard Magellan Pro wheeled research bot with a Canon pan-tilt-zoom camera on top. Final version used "semi-autonomous" guidance, where an operator would tell the robot to go to a point not too far away and the robot would go there. Big lead-acid gel batteries; PC on board did lots of processing. <gimmick>Robot could also generate red-blue stereogram images of site on operator command by rotating slowly and compiling distance data.</gimmick>
- University of South Florida: Teleoperated Urban tracked robots with FLIR sensors. Some info. Probably lead-acid batteries, don't know about onboard processing (suspect no much).
- Sharif University of Technology: Medium dog-sized tracked robot with binocular vision. Teleoperated by laptop or Palm. I wouldn't want to get in the way of this thing. Few or no sonars IIRC, giant lead-acid gel batteries, probably very little onboard processing.
- University of Minnesota: Cute tube-shaped robots designed (no joke) on a DARPA grant to be shot out of a grenade launcher. Completely radio controlled; AFAIK no smarts on board. Sent wireless video feed to monitors. A spring mechanism allowed them to jump out of tight spots. DARPA doesn't let them talk about power supply, other info.
- ?University of Utah?: A commodity approach: robots were Radio Shack RC cars with Basic STAMPs on board. While not completed at the contest, eventually they will swarm with complete autonomy around the disaster site, detect people (or other hot things) with IR sensors, and relay their position to a central controller. Power is a simple 9V battery.
- University of Edinbugh: don't recall exactly; despite all their valiant efforts, they couldn't get anything working in time. I think they were also working on an autonomous system of two or three bots.
All of the teleoperated robots were controlled wirelessly; none had tethers.Enough rambling for now. In any case, it was a really cool experience to go out to Seattle and see all the stuff the teams were trying. For me, robotics is a great, growing field that is a whole lot of fun, and the conference was one unforgettable week.
--Tom
tail -f /var/log/apache/access.log | perl -e '$!=1; while() { print "\007$_"; }'
of course, there's probably a better way, but you get the idea.
--Tom