Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see the advantage of this over a traditional notebook and a digital camera. Although that requires two different devices, it lets each of them be smaller, lighter, and more suited to their specific task without harming their ability to work together. This, on the other hand, means that whenever you want to take a video you have to bring your computer, and whenever you want to send an e-mail, you're carrying your camera with you.
Although this is produced by the same company as the HOAP-1, it has a very different focus. The HOAP was developed as a bipedal platform, to allow easier development of walking strategies and to allow developers to test out ideas about human-computer interactions. The development suite was released, and the main target was research groups.
The MARON-1, on the other hand, is much more of a high-end consumer product. Instead of cutting edge work on balance and bipedal locomotion, they adopted the tried and true wheel-based design. Instead of releasing the development environment and focusing on research, they gave it a much more basic interface and tried to make it accessible to people without previous robotics experience. The list of features isn't very impressive or cutting edge. What is impressive is the fact that they have developed a platform which is robust and easy to control (or so they claim), in a variety of real-world situations.
Although the cutting edge stuff like the HOAP is neat, without a base of real robots being used by real people, the field is just an academic exercise. The real tests of robotics for the near future will be in the areas of human-robot interactions, and in whether robots like this one will be able to fulfill their promises of ease-of-use and versitility.
The controversy over other discoveries has not been about what was discovered, it has been about what the definition of a planet is. Although the concept of a planet is used to teach children about the solar-system, in reality there is a gradation of objects from the large gas giants down to the smallest asteroids, and Pluto is much more similar to many smaller objects than it is to Jupiter.
The definition of planet that media reports on has nothing to do with actual astronomical concepts, only on the things people learned in school because 4th-graders don't get an overview of the fine-points of astro-physics.
This new object only serves to demonstrate how there is no hard and fast line delineating planets from non-planets, the debate in progress is only for the general public, astronomically the name is meaningless.
A better way to implement the optical switch ideas that people have been bringing up is to use a mirror attached to two fingers. Even if she has only very limited range of motion, any difference in motion between the two fingers will angle the mirror, and let her move the reflected image of the beam of light. If you set it up so that it only went off if she aimed the beam at a specific target, it wouldn't be as likely to go off every time she moved her fingers a little as the designs which react to her breaking a beam.
If you wanted to get fancy, you could set up a small projection screen and a cheap webcam so that you could have more intelligent response to her finger motions, and she could use the point of light essentially like a mouse, which I'm sure would be helpful for more than just the problem of waking her husband.
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Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see the advantage of this over a traditional notebook and a digital camera. Although that requires two different devices, it lets each of them be smaller, lighter, and more suited to their specific task without harming their ability to work together. This, on the other hand, means that whenever you want to take a video you have to bring your computer, and whenever you want to send an e-mail, you're carrying your camera with you.
Although this is produced by the same company as the HOAP-1, it has a very different focus. The HOAP was developed as a bipedal platform, to allow easier development of walking strategies and to allow developers to test out ideas about human-computer interactions. The development suite was released, and the main target was research groups. The MARON-1, on the other hand, is much more of a high-end consumer product. Instead of cutting edge work on balance and bipedal locomotion, they adopted the tried and true wheel-based design. Instead of releasing the development environment and focusing on research, they gave it a much more basic interface and tried to make it accessible to people without previous robotics experience. The list of features isn't very impressive or cutting edge. What is impressive is the fact that they have developed a platform which is robust and easy to control (or so they claim), in a variety of real-world situations. Although the cutting edge stuff like the HOAP is neat, without a base of real robots being used by real people, the field is just an academic exercise. The real tests of robotics for the near future will be in the areas of human-robot interactions, and in whether robots like this one will be able to fulfill their promises of ease-of-use and versitility.
The controversy over other discoveries has not been about what was discovered, it has been about what the definition of a planet is. Although the concept of a planet is used to teach children about the solar-system, in reality there is a gradation of objects from the large gas giants down to the smallest asteroids, and Pluto is much more similar to many smaller objects than it is to Jupiter.
The definition of planet that media reports on has nothing to do with actual astronomical concepts, only on the things people learned in school because 4th-graders don't get an overview of the fine-points of astro-physics.
This new object only serves to demonstrate how there is no hard and fast line delineating planets from non-planets, the debate in progress is only for the general public, astronomically the name is meaningless.
A better way to implement the optical switch ideas that people have been bringing up is to use a mirror attached to two fingers. Even if she has only very limited range of motion, any difference in motion between the two fingers will angle the mirror, and let her move the reflected image of the beam of light. If you set it up so that it only went off if she aimed the beam at a specific target, it wouldn't be as likely to go off every time she moved her fingers a little as the designs which react to her breaking a beam. If you wanted to get fancy, you could set up a small projection screen and a cheap webcam so that you could have more intelligent response to her finger motions, and she could use the point of light essentially like a mouse, which I'm sure would be helpful for more than just the problem of waking her husband.