This article comes across like a sci-fi movie, very aloof. The writer paraphrases and quotes from what another guy supposedly said, with no indication of technical facts or other groups or individuals that agree. I have no reason to believe the author and subject are credible, making it hard to trust the article. I'm not the most knowledgable on the FCC's policies, but I don't tend to believe this "evangalist" in general.
However technically speaking, there are some points that sound feasible and are likely true. I would expect that the FCC does inhibit inventors and small companies that have good ideas. Their licensing fees and other policies do make startup "disruptive technologies" difficult, which is exactly what the established companies that already have spectrum want. However some areas of the spectrum (i.e. 2.4GHz, etc) are open, and he fails to address the collision problems that exist in those areas. I think we are now beginning to see hardware in the free spectrums that is capable of dealing with very noisy environments, but in my eyes that equipment is still in it's infancy. (If someone knows more on that please reply to this post on this subject..) I would say once these technologies are proven, the FCC should listen, but in the meantime there is a LOT of equipment that isn't capable of dealing with this and could become rather useless if the spectrum is opened up. Seems like a logical approach, before changing the regulation system. Prove your point, man! Gimme some examples.
Granted Windows is part of the problem. I agree. But this crashing doesn't happen except with a couple of programs on Windows, everything else runs fine. Should I blame the OS for everything, or is the application somewhat responsible also? I personally feel that both are responsible.
If QT can't figure out how to write an application on windows that doesn't crash, that IS their fault - in addition to whatever instability the OS adds.
I could switch to Linux or whatever, but I don't want to turn this conversation into the ever-so-common slashdot OS flamewar. I do have reasons for using Windows, and that is my choice to reboot every few days.
I said nothing about file ownership in my post, why do you bring that up? And besides, they do take ownership by default, you have to go through and turn everything off if you don't want it to take over. If you select "easy install" you're hosed. Have you ever tried to "uninstall" these applications from your system? They just don't go away once they are in.
Ok your point is well made. Yes, eventually the costs are either eating into the profit margin or paid by the consumer. But I think you're carrying the analogy too far, health care is a different issue with more difficult implications.
If the effect is that consumers are paying a little more for "better" software then maybe it's worth it. How else are we going to get companies to write software that doesn't suck? I'm open to other ideas..
Man, I wish there was another player that could play real video/audio stuff. I'd switch so fast it would make their head spin. Quicktime is just as bad lately, I can't count how many times I've had to reboot because of that sh*t.
If anyone knows of software like this, please reply to this post! Of course if I decided to really "get rid" of realplayer I'd probably have to reformat my Hard drive..
They said in the article that the maximum payoff was $250, so don't worry about the $1000 that you're getting ready to poke yourself in the eye about...
Yes, the insurance company is probably the one who had to shell out the money.
But that's not the point, the effect is still there. More importantly the insurance company will likely have to raise their rates in order to support the payment - effectively costing the companies who carry this kind of insurance more. This translates to the right general effect, although admittedly indirectly.
We need to see more of these kind of lawsuits IMHO, if major software companies can be held accountable for glitches like this then we are a step closer to having better software produced. Support your local class action lawsuit.
Of course I've never personally used AOL, although I've had similar problems with lots of other software, anything from Microsoft for example. I wonder, could the subject of a new similar lawsuit be the many instances of covertly installed spyware along with other software? Hmm.
Yes, I would assume you're right.. "legally" we don't have a right for RF technologies to always work. FCC regulated or not, it comes down to your local area when you're using or considering using wireless phones, WiFi, or other wireless devices. When I was in grad school I was in a building where 2.4GHz was kind of noisy, I expect it was due to science research experiments and a steel-frame building. We just bought antennas and didn't worry about "legal" reasons. Seems everybody is too quick to complain about legality these days.
I think the real issue is more practical, who buys the technology not knowing that it will heavily interfere with certain wireless equipment. (I'm thinking office environments are the biggest issue) Doesn't the consumer have a right to know things like interference before purchasing a product? After reading the article I personally got the idea that I need to check out the lighting technology and be cautious of where it is installed. That's all, it's an old technique where you just don't buy something if you don't like the side effects.
The article makes a big point out of the collision between the frequency spectrums, however I personally am interested to find out more about the lighting technology that is "high efficiency and RF based". It seems the article kind of missed that explanation, and I can't find much information on it. The lighting's website is down that is referred to, and as far as I know this could be a "made up" problem (by this dude who wrote the article) primarily because it's only a problem if the lighting technology catches on.
Are the light technology elements mounted in the ceilings like conventional flourescent lights or does it use some kind of a central light-source idea. If it's high-brightness and high-efficiency anyway, the light source could be placed at a central (shielded) location and fiber optics used to distribute the light.
I'm all for new light technologies, although often flourescent lights are pretty good, there is still a lot of room for improvement. (Time delay to full brightness, hazardous materials, cheap ballasts that buzz, bad fluorescent tubes that put off funny-colored lights) But interfering with wireless spectrums (even unlicensed ones) seems like a bad idea in general... the amount of noise in any spectrum is becoming a serious concern for the design of "robust" wireless technologies.
And all that time I thought it was just my ISP that sucked when the "dark side" was taking over the address space. "Oh, now I get it. errrrrrr I think?"
It seems like the article could have had more explanaton and real information on what dark address space is.. I'm still not fully clear after reading. Is "dark address space" just unconnected networks or more subtle. I guess you really need to be a network person to understand fully.
Reminds me of the raging debate over dark matter in Astronomy, and how it accounts for the mass of the universe etc... The debates always involve crazy theories that pretty much contradict eachother until they finally high-enough resolution data..
It can see which newspaper you're reading when you are sitting on the toilet. It can examine the contents of your hard drive from miles out in space, and re-arrange your files so you can't find anything. Oh yeah, and it can shoot down nuclear warheads and probably play a mean game of CS.
I've never heard of so many diverse sensors placed in the same package, it seems somewhat ridiculous at first glance. I'm sure there is a scientific reason for it, but launching that big boy isn't going to be easy I'm sure.
Yeah, ok you guys got me. Scientifically speaking if the news was really new then they may not have actually known yet what the cause was. It's hard to tell on some of these/. stories when they actually occurred, sometimes it's way later that it gets posted. I guess I could have checked.
And that light-bulb idea sounds pretty plausible actually, although a bit beyond common reason. I'm an engineer but I have absolutely no idea how those things are constructed...
Seems strange that the article was so sketchy on why the damage was done. They sort of implied that the tank got overfilled, but then again they really avoided saying anything.
Why would a research instution hide the reason for the damage, afraid that they are going to cripple someone's career? It certainly is a tragedy, but the fact that they are not disclosing the real reason for the damage makes it more interesting somehow.
Thumbs up for cool Neutrino detectors though, it has been an unexplained scientific phenomena for a long time now. I hope they can fix it (and have the $$ too).
Actually they say that Intel is the first to release a "suite" of products.. as far as I know the existing products only consist of the PCMCIA cards. Tricky wording, but it looks like it fooled the brilliant, sleuthy,/. editors.. and you.
Proxim also has a line of 802.11a stuff, possibly a little further along. They have an Access Point that should be available at the end of November roughly, but the cards are available now supposedly. There is a company called Luna Communications handling the early release stuff.. Lunacom.com
We're planning on getting a setup soon, the claim of 54Mbit/s from the x2 technology sounds way too good to be true! Anyone have experience on actual speeds that they get? I've never even gotten close to 1/2 of the 802.11b bandwitdh maximum (11Mbit/s).
Posting late on this one, so chances are it won't get read too much.. but here goes.
The consensus seems to be in the direction of "games are art". I would tend to agree, although in my mind the definition of art is always fuzzy, almost annoyingly so actually. However I think an important question to ask is whether or not calling video games art has any important implications. I.e. what makes it important to make a distinction? Certainly an art exibit portraying video games in the MoMa would be interesting, but does that somehow change the status of video games?
I'm not sure, but does art follow different legal (patent/trademark/intellectual property) rules? This could have dramatic implications for the game business if there is a change, although this seems like the biggest possible effect I can think of.
Does it change people's opinions if we start calling QuakeIV art or not? Do art departments at universities suddenly have to start trying to hire Graphics and Computer Science Ph.Ds because it's now art? Maybe several new "artsy" magazines will spring up for the coffee table focusing on old/new computer games?
But maybe (and most importantly) will my Fiance may now let me play more games because they are no longer just a waste of time, but artistic expression?
I doubt they rely on batteries for those particular robots. Using flood lights requires a lot of power, and you would want the operational times to be in hours maybe tens of hours. I'm nearly positive they would have a tether on most of the robots that go in deep rubble, if something goes wrong you can usually use the umbilical to pull the robot back out. (Those things are expensive) Also the video transmission is much clearer (and easier) by using an umbilical.
Additionally, the chaotic nature of the environment wouldn't be one where you could depend on getting wireless coverage easily.. it could be easy to drop into a dead spot and lose control until the coverage is somehow fixed..
But I'm sure I made more out of this than what you were trying to mention... the run times on our bigger robots is probably 4 hours (depending), but they can't traverse rubble.
This is a really interesting opportunity for some high-tech to be applied to a real non-military situation. Robin Murphy came here to UCSD and talked a few months ago, and she actually brought (and we got to drive) the tracked one with the flippers in front.
Those things are not easy to drive. One of the most difficult things is getting a perspective on where the robot is in relation to it's surroundings (very rough rubble). This is an ongoing research area for many robotics teams, and one we have been working on also.
The submitter mentioned something about autonomous robots, I think they don't fully understand the difficulty of the problem which robotics researchers are working on. Navigating uneven building wreckage autonomously is an incredibly difficult problem, in general. Especially under the conditions of the WTC rubble. There may be some small parts of the process which can be automated, but I doubt it would be useful in this situation anyway. They were using the robots as probes to discover what was inside areas where it was dangerous for people to be there, so a human is already "in the loop". The real use of these systems is for remote visualization (i.e. show me what's in there) in hard to reach areas.
They didn't specify what types of cameras are being used, but this is a mostly visual problem from my understanding. Most robots have standard rectilinear camera views that are forward facing, unfortunately operation of these platforms is difficult becuause of the restricted field of view and inability to see on the left, right and behind the robot. Multiple cameras helps, but adds significant complexity and disjoint views.
A technology which really makes this easier is an Omni-directional Video sensor (which has a 360 deg. field of view around the sensor). These are ideal for "immersed" applications like this, and they literally give the operator a view of the entire space around the bot (except for directly overhead) and allow you to determine the robot's orientation relative to obstacles easily. The same data can also be unwarped and used to create a perspective or panoramic view of the area in real time. A pair of these and stereo software (which also has been done in our lab, [shameless plug over]) can provide a full depth-map of the area. The ODVS has the difficulty of limited resolution (same CCD, larger fov) but this can be supplemented by a Pan/Tilt/Zoom rectilinear camera.
Really the interesting part of research in this direction is the remote operation and visualizations that help the perator navigate through the area to achieve it's goal. This is what my thesis is on, actually.
Mobile Robots are cool. We even have one that pulls cables for us in the drop-ceiling of our lab... we're slowly working on a web-page for that new one.. I have a cool video for it already but it's HUGE (100M or so). Anyway, I'll shut up.
Yes, this technology pretty much already exists. Wireless with high-bandwidth is here. You'd have to have some kind of frequency scanner to detect some of the new tiny cameras on your lawn..
But let's not be freaked about all the surveilance which already exists as you pointed out, after all, and really now, why does it bother you that someone can watch you pick your nose? Under what circumstances (and how often) does this stuff infringe on your life? Let's pick out the major objections (besides "I want privacy outdoor in public spaces" arguments), and present them as problems to the people who incorrectly use surveillance data.
It's rather obvious now that fighting the surveillance technology itself is not practical. Focus on the use of the technology and people will listen.
I work in the Computer Vision and Robotics Research lab at UCSD. We have done research in many of the areas mentioned in the article, and are beginning some wearable computing starting with a PC-104 & i-glasses setup that another Grad student is working on. Wearables are cool stuff, we're already seeing phones, pagers, pdas, and watches unified.. next is more interfaces to the REAL world like he sums his article with.
But on to my main point. We've been operating for some time towards a concept we call Ubiquitous Vision, which means that basically we will eventually be able to look at any space (indoors/out), from any perspective and resolution using a distributed network of a variety of types of visual sensors, including mobile ones. The decreasing size and cost of these sensors makes this approach possible, and also is interesting from a user's perspective because of the freedom to choose the view of the scene.
We do get quite a few comments related to the potential impacts of such kinds of surveillance to people's everyday lives. Like he mentions in the article, as long as this kind of surveillance is possible for everyone - not just a select few (corporations, government, etc..) then there exists some kind of natural balancing mechanism. What's scary would be if only some specific organizations had access to the information and everyone else was prohibited from using it or doing their own surveillance.
However it seems essential to mention a point made before by people more intelligent than myself. It isn't the technology that is at fault for comprimising your privacy. It is the people who use it that need to be responsible, and the people who feel it is being used irresponsibly that should speak up, as many of you/.'ers do already. But rather than blatantly rejecting any form of surveillance as I typically see on here and other forums, maybe appropriate questions should be asked about why/how/who has access to the data being taken. These are the issues at the heart of the problem.
I personally think soon we will begin to see high-profile social organizations responsible for regulating the use of surveillance and making policy to protect us. EFF comes to mind. With the increased media attention now, I think we are on a collision course with this issue on a national/global scale. More to come, and it's going to be a very interesting and complex debate.
This project has been going on for some time now, it's been well publicized in the robotics community and is certainly an interesting offshoot of robotics. I saw a presentation at ICRA (International Conference for Robotics and Automation) last year. Very cool.
It strikes me as rather similar in approach to some of the nano-bot discussions I've read. I.e. build an "assembler" and use that to build other small pieces that can fit together modularly to do what you want. (that's kind of rough, but you get the idea) Interesting parallel in totally different research worlds, although modularity is hardly novel..
The approach does have it's challenges however, the number of independent modules arguably makes the complexity much higher per resultant functionality. A simpler robot could have achieved some of those configurations, and probably more efficiently (power,weight,computational, etc..). Similarly, most robots are rather specifically designed with some task in mind, making general purpose robots is an astoundingly difficult task because of the widely varying requirements of the physical world between different tasks.
I don't mean to bash, actually - I fully support this avenue of research and it's darn cool! Wish I had one..
Brett
UCSD Computer Vision and Robotics Lab Grad Student
Here's the CVRR web page if you're link-happy (no goats).
Slashdot Mirror
This article comes across like a sci-fi movie, very aloof. The writer paraphrases and quotes from what another guy supposedly said, with no indication of technical facts or other groups or individuals that agree. I have no reason to believe the author and subject are credible, making it hard to trust the article. I'm not the most knowledgable on the FCC's policies, but I don't tend to believe this "evangalist" in general.
However technically speaking, there are some points that sound feasible and are likely true. I would expect that the FCC does inhibit inventors and small companies that have good ideas. Their licensing fees and other policies do make startup "disruptive technologies" difficult, which is exactly what the established companies that already have spectrum want. However some areas of the spectrum (i.e. 2.4GHz, etc) are open, and he fails to address the collision problems that exist in those areas. I think we are now beginning to see hardware in the free spectrums that is capable of dealing with very noisy environments, but in my eyes that equipment is still in it's infancy. (If someone knows more on that please reply to this post on this subject..)
I would say once these technologies are proven, the FCC should listen, but in the meantime there is a LOT of equipment that isn't capable of dealing with this and could become rather useless if the spectrum is opened up. Seems like a logical approach, before changing the regulation system. Prove your point, man! Gimme some examples.
Exactly!
Granted Windows is part of the problem. I agree. But this crashing doesn't happen except with a couple of programs on Windows, everything else runs fine. Should I blame the OS for everything, or is the application somewhat responsible also? I personally feel that both are responsible.
If QT can't figure out how to write an application on windows that doesn't crash, that IS their fault - in addition to whatever instability the OS adds.
I could switch to Linux or whatever, but I don't want to turn this conversation into the ever-so-common slashdot OS flamewar. I do have reasons for using Windows, and that is my choice to reboot every few days.
I said nothing about file ownership in my post, why do you bring that up? And besides, they do take ownership by default, you have to go through and turn everything off if you don't want it to take over. If you select "easy install" you're hosed. Have you ever tried to "uninstall" these applications from your system? They just don't go away once they are in.
Ok your point is well made. Yes, eventually the costs are either eating into the profit margin or paid by the consumer. But I think you're carrying the analogy too far, health care is a different issue with more difficult implications.
If the effect is that consumers are paying a little more for "better" software then maybe it's worth it. How else are we going to get companies to write software that doesn't suck? I'm open to other ideas..
Man, I wish there was another player that could play real video/audio stuff. I'd switch so fast it would make their head spin. Quicktime is just as bad lately, I can't count how many times I've had to reboot because of that sh*t.
If anyone knows of software like this, please reply to this post! Of course if I decided to really "get rid" of realplayer I'd probably have to reformat my Hard drive..
They said in the article that the maximum payoff was $250, so don't worry about the $1000 that you're getting ready to poke yourself in the eye about...
Yes, the insurance company is probably the one who had to shell out the money.
But that's not the point, the effect is still there. More importantly the insurance company will likely have to raise their rates in order to support the payment - effectively costing the companies who carry this kind of insurance more. This translates to the right general effect, although admittedly indirectly.
We need to see more of these kind of lawsuits IMHO, if major software companies can be held accountable for glitches like this then we are a step closer to having better software produced. Support your local class action lawsuit.
Of course I've never personally used AOL, although I've had similar problems with lots of other software, anything from Microsoft for example. I wonder, could the subject of a new similar lawsuit be the many instances of covertly installed spyware along with other software? Hmm.
No worries, seen worse. Be a good Californian and go back to bed.
Heh. Course I live in Oregon now so I bet if they had a 5.2 out here everyone would be out on the street talking about how scared they were.
Yes, I would assume you're right.. "legally" we don't have a right for RF technologies to always work. FCC regulated or not, it comes down to your local area when you're using or considering using wireless phones, WiFi, or other wireless devices. When I was in grad school I was in a building where 2.4GHz was kind of noisy, I expect it was due to science research experiments and a steel-frame building. We just bought antennas and didn't worry about "legal" reasons. Seems everybody is too quick to complain about legality these days.
I think the real issue is more practical, who buys the technology not knowing that it will heavily interfere with certain wireless equipment. (I'm thinking office environments are the biggest issue) Doesn't the consumer have a right to know things like interference before purchasing a product? After reading the article I personally got the idea that I need to check out the lighting technology and be cautious of where it is installed. That's all, it's an old technique where you just don't buy something if you don't like the side effects.
The article makes a big point out of the collision between the frequency spectrums, however I personally am interested to find out more about the lighting technology that is "high efficiency and RF based". It seems the article kind of missed that explanation, and I can't find much information on it. The lighting's website is down that is referred to, and as far as I know this could be a "made up" problem (by this dude who wrote the article) primarily because it's only a problem if the lighting technology catches on.
Are the light technology elements mounted in the ceilings like conventional flourescent lights or does it use some kind of a central light-source idea. If it's high-brightness and high-efficiency anyway, the light source could be placed at a central (shielded) location and fiber optics used to distribute the light.
I'm all for new light technologies, although often flourescent lights are pretty good, there is still a lot of room for improvement. (Time delay to full brightness, hazardous materials, cheap ballasts that buzz, bad fluorescent tubes that put off funny-colored lights) But interfering with wireless spectrums (even unlicensed ones) seems like a bad idea in general... the amount of noise in any spectrum is becoming a serious concern for the design of "robust" wireless technologies.
And all that time I thought it was just my ISP that sucked when the "dark side" was taking over the address space. "Oh, now I get it. errrrrrr I think?"
It seems like the article could have had more explanaton and real information on what dark address space is.. I'm still not fully clear after reading. Is "dark address space" just unconnected networks or more subtle. I guess you really need to be a network person to understand fully.
Reminds me of the raging debate over dark matter in Astronomy, and how it accounts for the mass of the universe etc... The debates always involve crazy theories that pretty much contradict eachother until they finally high-enough resolution data..
It can see which newspaper you're reading when you are sitting on the toilet. It can examine the contents of your hard drive from miles out in space, and re-arrange your files so you can't find anything. Oh yeah, and it can shoot down nuclear warheads and probably play a mean game of CS.
I've never heard of so many diverse sensors placed in the same package, it seems somewhat ridiculous at first glance. I'm sure there is a scientific reason for it, but launching that big boy isn't going to be easy I'm sure.
Yeah, ok you guys got me. Scientifically speaking if the news was really new then they may not have actually known yet what the cause was. It's hard to tell on some of these /. stories when they actually occurred, sometimes it's way later that it gets posted. I guess I could have checked.
And that light-bulb idea sounds pretty plausible actually, although a bit beyond common reason. I'm an engineer but I have absolutely no idea how those things are constructed...
B
Seems strange that the article was so sketchy on why the damage was done. They sort of implied that the tank got overfilled, but then again they really avoided saying anything.
Why would a research instution hide the reason for the damage, afraid that they are going to cripple someone's career? It certainly is a tragedy, but the fact that they are not disclosing the real reason for the damage makes it more interesting somehow.
Thumbs up for cool Neutrino detectors though, it has been an unexplained scientific phenomena for a long time now. I hope they can fix it (and have the $$ too).
Brett
Actually they say that Intel is the first to release a "suite" of products.. as far as I know the existing products only consist of the PCMCIA cards. Tricky wording, but it looks like it fooled the brilliant, sleuthy, /. editors.. and you.
Brett
Proxim also has a line of 802.11a stuff, possibly a little further along. They have an Access Point that should be available at the end of November roughly, but the cards are available now supposedly. There is a company called Luna Communications handling the early release stuff.. Lunacom.com
Here's the link to Proxim
We're planning on getting a setup soon, the claim of 54Mbit/s from the x2 technology sounds way too good to be true! Anyone have experience on actual speeds that they get? I've never even gotten close to 1/2 of the 802.11b bandwitdh maximum (11Mbit/s).
Brett
Posting late on this one, so chances are it won't get read too much.. but here goes.
The consensus seems to be in the direction of "games are art". I would tend to agree, although in my mind the definition of art is always fuzzy, almost annoyingly so actually. However I think an important question to ask is whether or not calling video games art has any important implications. I.e. what makes it important to make a distinction? Certainly an art exibit portraying video games in the MoMa would be interesting, but does that somehow change the status of video games?
I'm not sure, but does art follow different legal (patent/trademark/intellectual property) rules? This could have dramatic implications for the game business if there is a change, although this seems like the biggest possible effect I can think of.
Does it change people's opinions if we start calling QuakeIV art or not? Do art departments at universities suddenly have to start trying to hire Graphics and Computer Science Ph.Ds because it's now art? Maybe several new "artsy" magazines will spring up for the coffee table focusing on old/new computer games?
But maybe (and most importantly) will my Fiance may now let me play more games because they are no longer just a waste of time, but artistic expression?
Brett
After making their reccomended changes I can't use
Windows Update either. Very interesting, how ironic that MS stuff is these days.
I doubt they rely on batteries for those particular robots. Using flood lights requires a lot of power, and you would want the operational times to be in hours maybe tens of hours. I'm nearly positive they would have a tether on most of the robots that go in deep rubble, if something goes wrong you can usually use the umbilical to pull the robot back out. (Those things are expensive) Also the video transmission is much clearer (and easier) by using an umbilical.
Additionally, the chaotic nature of the environment wouldn't be one where you could depend on getting wireless coverage easily.. it could be easy to drop into a dead spot and lose control until the coverage is somehow fixed..
But I'm sure I made more out of this than what you were trying to mention... the run times on our bigger robots is probably 4 hours (depending), but they can't traverse rubble.
Brett
This is a really interesting opportunity for some high-tech to be applied to a real non-military situation. Robin Murphy came here to UCSD and talked a few months ago, and she actually brought (and we got to drive) the tracked one with the flippers in front.
Those things are not easy to drive. One of the most difficult things is getting a perspective on where the robot is in relation to it's surroundings (very rough rubble). This is an ongoing research area for many robotics teams, and one we have been working on also.
The submitter mentioned something about autonomous robots, I think they don't fully understand the difficulty of the problem which robotics researchers are working on. Navigating uneven building wreckage autonomously is an incredibly difficult problem, in general. Especially under the conditions of the WTC rubble. There may be some small parts of the process which can be automated, but I doubt it would be useful in this situation anyway. They were using the robots as probes to discover what was inside areas where it was dangerous for people to be there, so a human is already "in the loop". The real use of these systems is for remote visualization (i.e. show me what's in there) in hard to reach areas.
They didn't specify what types of cameras are being used, but this is a mostly visual problem from my understanding. Most robots have standard rectilinear camera views that are forward facing, unfortunately operation of these platforms is difficult becuause of the restricted field of view and inability to see on the left, right and behind the robot. Multiple cameras helps, but adds significant complexity and disjoint views. A technology which really makes this easier is an Omni-directional Video sensor (which has a 360 deg. field of view around the sensor). These are ideal for "immersed" applications like this, and they literally give the operator a view of the entire space around the bot (except for directly overhead) and allow you to determine the robot's orientation relative to obstacles easily. The same data can also be unwarped and used to create a perspective or panoramic view of the area in real time. A pair of these and stereo software (which also has been done in our lab, [shameless plug over]) can provide a full depth-map of the area. The ODVS has the difficulty of limited resolution (same CCD, larger fov) but this can be supplemented by a Pan/Tilt/Zoom rectilinear camera.
Really the interesting part of research in this direction is the remote operation and visualizations that help the perator navigate through the area to achieve it's goal. This is what my thesis is on, actually.
More info: UCSD CVRR Lab The Page of Omnidirectional Vision and our source of ODVS. Also check Vstone (in Japanese, may need to run that last one through babelfish or something).
Mobile Robots are cool. We even have one that pulls cables for us in the drop-ceiling of our lab... we're slowly working on a web-page for that new one.. I have a cool video for it already but it's HUGE (100M or so). Anyway, I'll shut up.
Brett
Yes, this technology pretty much already exists. Wireless with high-bandwidth is here. You'd have to have some kind of frequency scanner to detect some of the new tiny cameras on your lawn..
But let's not be freaked about all the surveilance which already exists as you pointed out, after all, and really now, why does it bother you that someone can watch you pick your nose? Under what circumstances (and how often) does this stuff infringe on your life? Let's pick out the major objections (besides "I want privacy outdoor in public spaces" arguments), and present them as problems to the people who incorrectly use surveillance data.
It's rather obvious now that fighting the surveillance technology itself is not practical. Focus on the use of the technology and people will listen.
Brett
I work in the Computer Vision and Robotics Research lab at UCSD. We have done research in many of the areas mentioned in the article, and are beginning some wearable computing starting with a PC-104 & i-glasses setup that another Grad student is working on. Wearables are cool stuff, we're already seeing phones, pagers, pdas, and watches unified.. next is more interfaces to the REAL world like he sums his article with.
/.'ers do already. But rather than blatantly rejecting any form of surveillance as I typically see on here and other forums, maybe appropriate questions should be asked about why/how/who has access to the data being taken. These are the issues at the heart of the problem.
But on to my main point. We've been operating for some time towards a concept we call Ubiquitous Vision, which means that basically we will eventually be able to look at any space (indoors/out), from any perspective and resolution using a distributed network of a variety of types of visual sensors, including mobile ones. The decreasing size and cost of these sensors makes this approach possible, and also is interesting from a user's perspective because of the freedom to choose the view of the scene.
We do get quite a few comments related to the potential impacts of such kinds of surveillance to people's everyday lives. Like he mentions in the article, as long as this kind of surveillance is possible for everyone - not just a select few (corporations, government, etc..) then there exists some kind of natural balancing mechanism. What's scary would be if only some specific organizations had access to the information and everyone else was prohibited from using it or doing their own surveillance.
However it seems essential to mention a point made before by people more intelligent than myself. It isn't the technology that is at fault for comprimising your privacy. It is the people who use it that need to be responsible, and the people who feel it is being used irresponsibly that should speak up, as many of you
I personally think soon we will begin to see high-profile social organizations responsible for regulating the use of surveillance and making policy to protect us. EFF comes to mind. With the increased media attention now, I think we are on a collision course with this issue on a national/global scale. More to come, and it's going to be a very interesting and complex debate.
Just my $.02
Brett
Cmon, Genocide? That's GOT to be a bad idea. Take it easy dude.
REAlly now, I hope you're joking. They haven't even found out who did it yet, just because they suspect Bin Laden is no reason to pass judgement yet.
Spend more time worrying about our own decreasing freedom in the US..
This project has been going on for some time now, it's been well publicized in the robotics community and is certainly an interesting offshoot of robotics. I saw a presentation at ICRA (International Conference for Robotics and Automation) last year. Very cool.
It strikes me as rather similar in approach to some of the nano-bot discussions I've read. I.e. build an "assembler" and use that to build other small pieces that can fit together modularly to do what you want. (that's kind of rough, but you get the idea) Interesting parallel in totally different research worlds, although modularity is hardly novel..
The approach does have it's challenges however, the number of independent modules arguably makes the complexity much higher per resultant functionality. A simpler robot could have achieved some of those configurations, and probably more efficiently (power,weight,computational, etc..). Similarly, most robots are rather specifically designed with some task in mind, making general purpose robots is an astoundingly difficult task because of the widely varying requirements of the physical world between different tasks.
I don't mean to bash, actually - I fully support this avenue of research and it's darn cool! Wish I had one..
Brett
UCSD Computer Vision and Robotics Lab Grad Student
Here's the CVRR web page if you're link-happy (no goats).