hmm, we're on the trolling borderline, here, aren't we?
I do not like the precendent that the judge is setting.
precisely what precendent would that be? trustbusting is a time-honored tradition, with plenty of precendent and law to support it. why should the software industry be exempt from a good chunk of corporate law?
Involuntarily splitting up a software company certainly limits freedom to innovate or create products
it certainly limits their ability to perform activities that were illegal under anti-monopoly statues, and they have clearly shown that they're not going to reform their actions short of that. thus "regulated marketplace" steps in. they've lost some freedoms, yes. punishment for breaking the law generally involves some loss of freedom, for some odd reason -- the reasoning has something to do with preventing future occurances of illegal behavior.
this is irrelevent to the law side of the issue, but I think that, propaganda notwithstanding, it's pretty well established that the amount* of innovation acquired in a hostile manner or downright destroyed by Microsoft is far, far less than what it has itself produced.
Hopefully this will make Kerberos play ball too!
well, I didn't know that protocols could play sports, or indeed "do" anything...
all kidding aside, I think what you might mean is that you'd like for Microsoft to play ball on the issue of their not very interoperable "implementation" of the Kerberos protocol. even though there is a vanishingly small line between protocols and API's, I don't think this will be revealed by this court decision. perhaps another court will find that posting your "trade secret" on the web does not constitute "proper protection" and since trade secrets are not subject to copyright, that document will be free to distribute (well, that is my impression, at least).
who knows what will happen. it's an interesting time.
Lea
* -- by amount, I mean that you could count by either quality or sheer volume
well, everything written on/in plastic will last longer than that... so all you need is a nice little laser cutter, and some acrylic. you print to it just like a printer. voila -- instant (and pretty permanent) writing. and some really sweet business cards.
I thought the difference between Jews and Christians was that the Christians think that Jesus is the Son of God and Jews think Jesus was a false profit.
putting aside any financial jokes for the time being, the difference is that Christians now think Jesus was the One True Savior (tm) Son of God (c), etc. Jews instead see Jesus as a wise prophet, but not The Savior.
after the whole mix-up, NASA impressed upon everyone to use metric units as much as possible -- that that should always be the default. in a lot of areas it is anyways. according to my boyfriend (the mechanical engineer), the reason why they have to stick with those crazy units is becasue the manufacturing capability of the whole US is geared towards it. it's not exactly a good thing to design a part in metric, convert the numbers, and hand it over to the machine shop.
interestingly enough, this happens in reverse a lot when something in designed in the US and manufactured in other countries -- the engineers are used to imperial, so that's what they use, and the numbers end up being/crazy/ in metric. while this isn't a huge problem if you don't need a really, really good tolerance, for space stuff it's absolutely necessary.
One thing that pisses me off is when people say they believe in this or they don't believe in that. A real scientist should never form a concrete opinion.
oddly enough you seem to hold a concrete opinion right here.
I happen to believe that the Big Bang theory is valid, and likewise evolution. this does not mean that I'm dogmatic about it, simply that my judgement rests on that side of the argument. this is subject to review in the face of new evidence.
being rational is in no way equivalent to being spineless. if I happen to believe that there is/are or is/are not a/many god(s), this does not mean that I am not a real scientist.
perhaps you'd care to spell out how these very concrete beliefs interfere with my pursuit of science:
I like cheese
detergent smells nice
my dog is named Jack
feminism has generally improved the position and prospects of women
my roomate is antisocial
I have a math final on saturday
1+1 = 2
relativism is an awfully nihilistic road to travel. when you come right down to it, you can't prove your own existance either (je pense donc je suis has a few problems with it). it's simple to tear down, but doesn't help anything. what we're looking at is a self-consistent whole. if you care to throw that away, that's fine for you, but I beleive that, according to your own code of values, you should reserve your judgement on the rest of us
ok, here goes the second try, since this didn't seem to post before, for whatever reason (even though I got the confirmation screen!). hmm. bug?
in any case, I was asking whether that was Dr. Agrawal who gave that talk. my guess is that it was, since he worked at PARC last summer on PolyBot, and that seems to be what you're referring to (say hi to him from me, if you see him, if you would)
this is different than modular robotics is a few ways. this is "evolving" robots for one specific task. controlling them (in general) won't take nearly as much processing power, since it's controlling itself in a functioning (and efficient, if you select for that) way with an evolved brain. modular reconfigurable robots take so much processing power if you control them in an extremely general fashion, because they're so flexible. one robot, infinite tasks and infinite ways to accomplish it. TMTOWTDI^n, really.
I have to agree -- they're really a BIG pain to control, because of force constraints, shattering acrylic, and such (a lot of this is fixed by new hardware). it basically involves a very large amount of experimentation and tweaking, at least the way I end up doing it.:) it's a very interesting controls problem to do this in general, and perhaps the DEMO lab's techniques could be applied here. I don't believe there was any work in this area done on PolyBot, but it could have interesting results.
well, I worked next to their lab a few years ago (and one of my friends worked in the lab, but hung out in mine -- more room) and they were working on this sort of thing then. and I have to say, I've never seen anything even vaguely pretty come out of this, but what comes out does fit the specs. the lego cranes can really lift the load, the little running guys stop running into things, whatever.
when you start going automated, you get stuff which is ugly, if you don't specifically program esthetics in there. you get things that are inefficent, if you don't specifically program efficency in. you get things which are just amazingly silly, if you don't do your limiting conditions (or your math!) quite right. this will give you exactly what you ask for. right now it's "just" a matter of learning how to specify things, and more effecient ways to "breed" them and prune out the tree. an interesting technology to be sure...
very close to the stuff I'm doing right now, though I'm just doing it because it's just sitting in the way of waht I really want to do, really:)
if you remember the "nasa" snakebot article, that robot was actually a copy of PARC's PolyBot. They have another robot (not completely built yet) called Proteo which is exactly the embodiment of something like this.
it's a good idea for some applications, especially for self-replicating types, but there's no real way to stream instructions to several billion running around in a spacesuit (for example) without some getting a huge lag. this/is/ one of those things on my todo list, but I'm a little busy:)
and in any case, you need logic circuits to run this thing, no matter what, and there aren't any other viable options other than using nanocomputing. mechanical, electrical, whatever. you have to have something on the other end, or else the instructions aren't going to help at all.
another problem that people are beginning to run into is that nanotech won't interface with what we have now very smoothly. there's going to have to be a huge changeover from one type of tech to another. it's not quite as bad as quantum, but think that sort of a change.
in any case, there is a lot of promise to nanocomputing in just about every application, especially embedded or portable stuff (can you IMAGINE the mp3 players?:) ). I'd suggest taking a look at some of the more popular works of Drexler (mostly) and Merkle. there are all sorts of reasons to want nanotech in general, nanorobotics more in specific, and nanocomputing most specifically -- and not only becasue we'll need it to run all the other stuff.
well, if we want nanorobotics (and I'm sure that I do), we need some computers to power them. would you like to try to stick a pentium in my nanorobot that's the size of a blood cell?
probably the best solution to the heat dissipation problem is reversible computing. I looked on google and found some links:
a group who say they've made a reversible-architecture CPU
Mike's BibTeX file. I have no idea who the guy is, but there are some papers on the concept.
quantum computing is very good for many tasks (bye-bye Mr. NP-complete!), but not necissarily as good for others. however, my guess is that nanotech will allow quantum computing to become practical
actually, you might want to take a look at some of the more popular works of Merkle and Drexler, describing (very accurately) both the advantages and disadvantages of nanotechnology. the environmental consequences are actually one of the best things, in my opinion.
self-replication and self-assembly mean factories turn into tanks, without spewing toxic chemicals all over the place. we would probably almost entirely stop using roads for shipping (and transportation in cities) in favor of extremely fast underground subways. we can smear the roads with an extremely tough substance which essentially acts as a solar panel that you can drive on and lasts for quite a long time. it's a very good way to get power -- you take otherwise useless radiating heat from the roads outside, and you release it out your roof, and on the way it's done a little work. toxic waste? that's one of the easiest of all to take care of. think of the bacteria that scientists are developing to "eat" oil slicks. it's more than possible to break down, molecule by molecule, entire toxic waste dumps into basically whatever you would like.
disadvantages: grey goo. if something eats up the entire earth, the environment will go, along with everything else. there are quite a lot of people worrying about this -- we anticipated it, so it's likely we can take care of the risk (through blue goo or similar)
there are other advantages: perfect recycling at a molecular level, basically an end to cancer and many other lethal and debilitating diseases, a chance to explore our galaxy... there are disadvantages as well -- but the environmental condition is not likely to be one of them.
oddly enough, my nanotech research could use some of the molecular computers that I've been designing (that's just a sideline)
what I really need to simulate are emergent behavior algorithms -- then I need to explain them to mechanical engineers, which is the/really/ hard part. I'm thinking pretty pictures:)
well, I'd have to say that for something made "quickly and easily" there was quite a lot of effort expended. it's a quite impressive piece of hardware, though if you look at the goals on the webpage you can see that no one thinks that this is going to be the last generation, with motors with giant gearboxes and such.
there is a certain difference between coding and "real" engineering in the time for feedback. I write code. I compile. I fix bugs. I compile. I fix more bugs. I compile. that's/three/ generations in the space of 15 minutes (not keeping in mind that the easy availibility of compilers makes us a bit sloppier, since we know the compiler will catch mispellings, etc fast). hardware takes so much more time (even the version nasa's got takes time -- trust me, I glued a LOT of those kind together last summer) before you can even start debugging.
also something that I think the article glossed over is that the basic architecture of these robots is reconfigurable. take a look at the polybot on the PARC page -- polybot is shown as a spider, a snake, and a rolling track, among other configurations. not only can it make these configurations, but it can change between them by itself, and (for example) standing up as a spider from completely flat on the floor takes a lot more power than a snake does.
in any case, since you don't have your email up, feel free to continue this conversation by mailing me at chialea at nanorobotics.org
Hmmm. You do realize that the simple fact that the very sight of these CDs turns your stomach does not entitle you to sell them? If you sell them without remitting royalties to Metallica, you have committed a violation against the copyright holder, and I understand the holders of the Metallica copyrights are a bit touchy here lately...
though you're probably kidding, I thought I'd point out something that people like the RIAA would really like to get rid of: the principle of first sale. basically it says that they can't do anything about (who/what/whether) you sell it. Now, with DMCA, it is possible to technologically block this, though it is yet another principle enshrined in copyright/fair use law.
so, though you're not allowed to make copies and distribute/sell them, you can take your original copy and pass it on/sell it/microwave it, and there isn't anything they can do about it.
Lea
Re:More stuff to smash into planets
on
NASA Snake-Bots
·
· Score: 2
What makes these snakes better or worse than Mars Lander for smashing into nearby planets with?
1. they can curl up into small spaces and make themself more resistant to high-G environments
2. they can change configuration depending on terrain
3. more robot per space/load becasue they can turn into someting much larger
4. resistant to breaking down, since they're massively redundant
for other reasons, take a look at my other post for the link to PARC's site.
Solar cells, along with small batteries, would probably be sufficient. And if they're working in darkness, they can just use temporary mirrors.
I think you're vastly underestimating the amount of current it presently draws... however, if you're in free-fall, you wouldn't need such hefty motors, which would solve most of that problem. the problem with that solution is that from what I've talked with the NASA guys about, they were thinking also surface applications (they make some pretty sweet freefall robots too, but mostly mars rovers). the one that NASA's got (unless they rebuilt it since I've seen it) is made out of PVC and little servos -- it's quite weak. the newer polybot (there's pictures of it on the parc page) is VERY heavy, with hefty motors to move it around.
The snake will need to perform complex folding and grasping motions using a dozen joints. Designing that control system will be formidable
you're telling me! it's really very interesting controls research stuff. what do you do with a few hundred little modules which are pretty useless by themselves, and autonomous? how do you get them to work together? what happens when some of em break? (because some of them will break, if you have that many) if it wasn't so hard, the researchers probably wouldn't be so interested (I know I wouldn't):)
And then they want detachable segments!
indeed. the new polybot can do it, and in fact demoed it at Comdex.
the technology is facinating, as are the controls issues that accompany it. it's working incredibly well, I think.
I haven't been around there since winter break, so I don't know the current state of things exactly... that was one of the issues being looked at during my winter break, and surely something that would need to be improved vastly for space exploration.
a tether has advantages, however -- especially when it tends to go wandering down hallways on its own (I was programming an older version, with a HC6811 as the brain, and exactly ZERO sensors) and when you have it climbing ladders and such.
oh, there is some cool stuff in there. take a look at the Modular Reconfigurable Robotics page at PARC for some other related projects.
however, about making it cheaper, a lot of what is expensive is custom (and very complex) circuitboards, processors that are very hard to find, and stuff like that. very sweet hardware -- but it's not going to be cost effective right now, or at least until it's a little more developed.
then again, Mark hasn't told me what I'm doing this summer (and I've been too occupied with finals to ask)
Slashdot Mirror
hmm, we're on the trolling borderline, here, aren't we?
I do not like the precendent that the judge is setting.
precisely what precendent would that be? trustbusting is a time-honored tradition, with plenty of precendent and law to support it. why should the software industry be exempt from a good chunk of corporate law?
Involuntarily splitting up a software company certainly limits freedom to innovate or create products
it certainly limits their ability to perform activities that were illegal under anti-monopoly statues, and they have clearly shown that they're not going to reform their actions short of that. thus "regulated marketplace" steps in. they've lost some freedoms, yes. punishment for breaking the law generally involves some loss of freedom, for some odd reason -- the reasoning has something to do with preventing future occurances of illegal behavior.
this is irrelevent to the law side of the issue, but I think that, propaganda notwithstanding, it's pretty well established that the amount* of innovation acquired in a hostile manner or downright destroyed by Microsoft is far, far less than what it has itself produced.
Hopefully this will make Kerberos play ball too!
well, I didn't know that protocols could play sports, or indeed "do" anything...
all kidding aside, I think what you might mean is that you'd like for Microsoft to play ball on the issue of their not very interoperable "implementation" of the Kerberos protocol. even though there is a vanishingly small line between protocols and API's, I don't think this will be revealed by this court decision. perhaps another court will find that posting your "trade secret" on the web does not constitute "proper protection" and since trade secrets are not subject to copyright, that document will be free to distribute (well, that is my impression, at least).
who knows what will happen. it's an interesting time.
Lea
* -- by amount, I mean that you could count by either quality or sheer volume
well, everything written on/in plastic will last longer than that... so all you need is a nice little laser cutter, and some acrylic. you print to it just like a printer. voila -- instant (and pretty permanent) writing. and some really sweet business cards.
Lea
I thought the difference between Jews and Christians was that the Christians think that Jesus is the Son of God and Jews think Jesus was a false profit.
putting aside any financial jokes for the time being, the difference is that Christians now think Jesus was the One True Savior (tm) Son of God (c), etc. Jews instead see Jesus as a wise prophet, but not The Savior.
Lea
that's free redirection, sure, but that doesn't help me if I don't have a static IP or at least some form of URL in the first place.
Lea
all of those people work in nanotech
Lea
a rover I used to work on will apparently be launched in 2003, and there will be other rover flight missions.
this one's HUGE compared to sojourner, and much more capable.
Lea
after the whole mix-up, NASA impressed upon everyone to use metric units as much as possible -- that that should always be the default. in a lot of areas it is anyways. according to my boyfriend (the mechanical engineer), the reason why they have to stick with those crazy units is becasue the manufacturing capability of the whole US is geared towards it. it's not exactly a good thing to design a part in metric, convert the numbers, and hand it over to the machine shop.
/crazy/ in metric. while this isn't a huge problem if you don't need a really, really good tolerance, for space stuff it's absolutely necessary.
interestingly enough, this happens in reverse a lot when something in designed in the US and manufactured in other countries -- the engineers are used to imperial, so that's what they use, and the numbers end up being
Lea
hey, I think they're both interesting, no prob here :)
Lea
indeed they are. I'm just asking what point there is in getting so excited over it.
Lea
ah. I guessed wrong :)
btw, Mark isn't a professor, he's a researcher (since PARC wasn't an academic institution when last I checked -- though it seems awfully like it)...
I still think the concepts behind them are completely different, though...
Lea
oddly enough you seem to hold a concrete opinion right here.
I happen to believe that the Big Bang theory is valid, and likewise evolution. this does not mean that I'm dogmatic about it, simply that my judgement rests on that side of the argument. this is subject to review in the face of new evidence.
being rational is in no way equivalent to being spineless. if I happen to believe that there is/are or is/are not a/many god(s), this does not mean that I am not a real scientist.
perhaps you'd care to spell out how these very concrete beliefs interfere with my pursuit of science:
- I like cheese
- detergent smells nice
- my dog is named Jack
- feminism has generally improved the position and prospects of women
- my roomate is antisocial
- I have a math final on saturday
- 1+1 = 2
relativism is an awfully nihilistic road to travel. when you come right down to it, you can't prove your own existance either (je pense donc je suis has a few problems with it). it's simple to tear down, but doesn't help anything. what we're looking at is a self-consistent whole. if you care to throw that away, that's fine for you, but I beleive that, according to your own code of values, you should reserve your judgement on the rest of usLea
ok, here goes the second try, since this didn't seem to post before, for whatever reason (even though I got the confirmation screen!). hmm. bug?
:) it's a very interesting controls problem to do this in general, and perhaps the DEMO lab's techniques could be applied here. I don't believe there was any work in this area done on PolyBot, but it could have interesting results.
in any case, I was asking whether that was Dr. Agrawal who gave that talk. my guess is that it was, since he worked at PARC last summer on PolyBot, and that seems to be what you're referring to (say hi to him from me, if you see him, if you would)
this is different than modular robotics is a few ways. this is "evolving" robots for one specific task. controlling them (in general) won't take nearly as much processing power, since it's controlling itself in a functioning (and efficient, if you select for that) way with an evolved brain. modular reconfigurable robots take so much processing power if you control them in an extremely general fashion, because they're so flexible. one robot, infinite tasks and infinite ways to accomplish it. TMTOWTDI^n, really.
I have to agree -- they're really a BIG pain to control, because of force constraints, shattering acrylic, and such (a lot of this is fixed by new hardware). it basically involves a very large amount of experimentation and tweaking, at least the way I end up doing it.
Lea
well, I worked next to their lab a few years ago (and one of my friends worked in the lab, but hung out in mine -- more room) and they were working on this sort of thing then. and I have to say, I've never seen anything even vaguely pretty come out of this, but what comes out does fit the specs. the lego cranes can really lift the load, the little running guys stop running into things, whatever.
when you start going automated, you get stuff which is ugly, if you don't specifically program esthetics in there. you get things that are inefficent, if you don't specifically program efficency in. you get things which are just amazingly silly, if you don't do your limiting conditions (or your math!) quite right. this will give you exactly what you ask for. right now it's "just" a matter of learning how to specify things, and more effecient ways to "breed" them and prune out the tree. an interesting technology to be sure...
Lea
very close to the stuff I'm doing right now, though I'm just doing it because it's just sitting in the way of waht I really want to do, really :)
if you remember the "nasa" snakebot article, that robot was actually a copy of PARC's PolyBot. They have another robot (not completely built yet) called Proteo which is exactly the embodiment of something like this.
Lea
it's a good idea for some applications, especially for self-replicating types, but there's no real way to stream instructions to several billion running around in a spacesuit (for example) without some getting a huge lag. this /is/ one of those things on my todo list, but I'm a little busy :)
:) ). I'd suggest taking a look at some of the more popular works of Drexler (mostly) and Merkle. there are all sorts of reasons to want nanotech in general, nanorobotics more in specific, and nanocomputing most specifically -- and not only becasue we'll need it to run all the other stuff.
and in any case, you need logic circuits to run this thing, no matter what, and there aren't any other viable options other than using nanocomputing. mechanical, electrical, whatever. you have to have something on the other end, or else the instructions aren't going to help at all.
another problem that people are beginning to run into is that nanotech won't interface with what we have now very smoothly. there's going to have to be a huge changeover from one type of tech to another. it's not quite as bad as quantum, but think that sort of a change.
in any case, there is a lot of promise to nanocomputing in just about every application, especially embedded or portable stuff (can you IMAGINE the mp3 players?
Lea
probably the best solution to the heat dissipation problem is reversible computing. I looked on google and found some links:
- Zyvex has a bit on the subject
- a group who say they've made a reversible-architecture CPU
- Mike's BibTeX file. I have no idea who the guy is, but there are some papers on the concept.
quantum computing is very good for many tasks (bye-bye Mr. NP-complete!), but not necissarily as good for others. however, my guess is that nanotech will allow quantum computing to become practicalLea
self-replication and self-assembly mean factories turn into tanks, without spewing toxic chemicals all over the place. we would probably almost entirely stop using roads for shipping (and transportation in cities) in favor of extremely fast underground subways. we can smear the roads with an extremely tough substance which essentially acts as a solar panel that you can drive on and lasts for quite a long time. it's a very good way to get power -- you take otherwise useless radiating heat from the roads outside, and you release it out your roof, and on the way it's done a little work. toxic waste? that's one of the easiest of all to take care of. think of the bacteria that scientists are developing to "eat" oil slicks. it's more than possible to break down, molecule by molecule, entire toxic waste dumps into basically whatever you would like.
disadvantages: grey goo. if something eats up the entire earth, the environment will go, along with everything else. there are quite a lot of people worrying about this -- we anticipated it, so it's likely we can take care of the risk (through blue goo or similar)
there are other advantages: perfect recycling at a molecular level, basically an end to cancer and many other lethal and debilitating diseases, a chance to explore our galaxy... there are disadvantages as well -- but the environmental condition is not likely to be one of them.
Lea
oddly enough, my nanotech research could use some of the molecular computers that I've been designing (that's just a sideline)
/really/ hard part. I'm thinking pretty pictures :)
what I really need to simulate are emergent behavior algorithms -- then I need to explain them to mechanical engineers, which is the
Lea
well, I'd have to say that for something made "quickly and easily" there was quite a lot of effort expended. it's a quite impressive piece of hardware, though if you look at the goals on the webpage you can see that no one thinks that this is going to be the last generation, with motors with giant gearboxes and such.
/three/ generations in the space of 15 minutes (not keeping in mind that the easy availibility of compilers makes us a bit sloppier, since we know the compiler will catch mispellings, etc fast). hardware takes so much more time (even the version nasa's got takes time -- trust me, I glued a LOT of those kind together last summer) before you can even start debugging.
there is a certain difference between coding and "real" engineering in the time for feedback. I write code. I compile. I fix bugs. I compile. I fix more bugs. I compile. that's
also something that I think the article glossed over is that the basic architecture of these robots is reconfigurable. take a look at the polybot on the PARC page -- polybot is shown as a spider, a snake, and a rolling track, among other configurations. not only can it make these configurations, but it can change between them by itself, and (for example) standing up as a spider from completely flat on the floor takes a lot more power than a snake does.
in any case, since you don't have your email up, feel free to continue this conversation by mailing me at chialea at nanorobotics.org
Lea
though you're probably kidding, I thought I'd point out something that people like the RIAA would really like to get rid of: the principle of first sale. basically it says that they can't do anything about (who/what/whether) you sell it. Now, with DMCA, it is possible to technologically block this, though it is yet another principle enshrined in copyright/fair use law.
so, though you're not allowed to make copies and distribute/sell them, you can take your original copy and pass it on/sell it/microwave it, and there isn't anything they can do about it.
Lea
What makes these snakes better or worse than Mars Lander for smashing into nearby planets with?
1. they can curl up into small spaces and make themself more resistant to high-G environments
2. they can change configuration depending on terrain
3. more robot per space/load becasue they can turn into someting much larger
4. resistant to breaking down, since they're massively redundant
for other reasons, take a look at my other post for the link to PARC's site.
Lea
I think you're vastly underestimating the amount of current it presently draws... however, if you're in free-fall, you wouldn't need such hefty motors, which would solve most of that problem. the problem with that solution is that from what I've talked with the NASA guys about, they were thinking also surface applications (they make some pretty sweet freefall robots too, but mostly mars rovers). the one that NASA's got (unless they rebuilt it since I've seen it) is made out of PVC and little servos -- it's quite weak. the newer polybot (there's pictures of it on the parc page) is VERY heavy, with hefty motors to move it around.
The snake will need to perform complex folding and grasping motions using a dozen joints. Designing that control system will be formidable
you're telling me! it's really very interesting controls research stuff. what do you do with a few hundred little modules which are pretty useless by themselves, and autonomous? how do you get them to work together? what happens when some of em break? (because some of them will break, if you have that many) if it wasn't so hard, the researchers probably wouldn't be so interested (I know I wouldn't) :)
And then they want detachable segments!
indeed. the new polybot can do it, and in fact demoed it at Comdex.
the technology is facinating, as are the controls issues that accompany it. it's working incredibly well, I think.
Lea
heh. I've pointed him at /. enough... if nothing's coming up, he might, though of course I couldn't speak for him. wheedle a bit, though, yes :)
Lea
I haven't been around there since winter break, so I don't know the current state of things exactly... that was one of the issues being looked at during my winter break, and surely something that would need to be improved vastly for space exploration.
a tether has advantages, however -- especially when it tends to go wandering down hallways on its own (I was programming an older version, with a HC6811 as the brain, and exactly ZERO sensors) and when you have it climbing ladders and such.
Lea
however, about making it cheaper, a lot of what is expensive is custom (and very complex) circuitboards, processors that are very hard to find, and stuff like that. very sweet hardware -- but it's not going to be cost effective right now, or at least until it's a little more developed.
then again, Mark hasn't told me what I'm doing this summer (and I've been too occupied with finals to ask)
Lea