A correction on the above post: Both the papers do mention the RMP. Looks like I scanned the papers a bit too fast. One of the authors emailed me to set the record straight.
Preface: My lab has four Segway-RMPs (RMP = robotics mobility platform). I don't work with them directly, but I know quite a bit about the work being done.
The main advantage of the ballbot is that it can be narrower to fit in tight spaces. The footprint of an RMP isn't really any better than the other robots it replaces. The Segway's main advantages are that it is fast, it works outdoors, and it can carry fairly heavly loads. The ballbot looks like a work in progress, and the results in the paper do not indicate that the control is anywhere near as stable as the current Segways.
In the paper they state the inevitable demise of statically balanced robots, though I'm not sure I believe that. Balance controllers are not very friendly when they trip over objects on the floor - they drive faster and faster into the object until the object yields (i.e. breaks) or the robot cannot keep up, and eventually fall one way or the other. An angry Segway is thus not very pleasant. Balanced platforms do react nicely to disturbances at the top end, however. Ballbot will have to have a smooth cover so as not to get hooked on anything, which is another problem. Ultimately, I would not be suprised to eventually see semi-balanced bases: A statically stable robot that can hinge near the bottom for dynamic actions but can come to rest while holding a position.
Regarding the speed issue, I think I'd be happy to race an RMP against the ballbot. Even if directional changes are required for the Segway, it would be hard to beat it over a traversal of any length. Our lab is also at CMU, so a race is actually possible:) The current owner of Xavier should throw him in there too; He looks very lonely now as he has been consigned to work on a robotic crane for several years now instead of roaming the halls of Wean or NSH.
Finally, it is quite a shame the paper doesn't even seem to acknowledge the existence of RMPs. Yes, they are not the original self-balancing robots, but they are the only one which is commercially available, and famous enough that they likely form the inspiration for this work. We've had the RMPs since 2003 (which the Segway HT obviously pre-dates), and the earliest ballbot paper was 2005.
Yes, this is in fact quite old. I get about 50 spams/day, so new trends come to me pretty quickly. Here's some text from a spam I got in Feb 2004, with text that obviously came from a news site:
Minnesota, which can clinch a wild-card playoff spot with a loss by either Carolina or St. Louis this weekend, appeared on its way to retaking the lead. But a holding penalty on Birk -- the Vikings were flagged nine times for 78 yards -- wiped out a 16-yard run by Michael Bennett that would have given them the ball at the Green Bay 40 just before the 2-minute warning. The Vikings (8-7), though, couldn't get what they needed from a pass defense that has struggled all season. Government spokesman Raanan Gissin said four soldiers were killed. Six people were taken to hospital -- four badly hurt, one with moderate injuries and one lightly injured, military sources said. The sources said another soldier remained beneath the rubble. Gissin said rescue operations were continuing Sunday night.
No, but it could be the victory screen at the end of the game: "Contratulations! Now you know what the name of the game means. Stare into the dark abyss and contemplate you past, present and future."
From the outside, we don't really know enough about their problems to suggest a solution. So, clearly the NSA should bring in an unbiased outside consultant, and brief him/her fully on every project that they need to accomodate. As an honest patriot, I am willing to volunteer.
I was referring to unmonitored alarms (or alarms monitored in theory but not in practice). There are a lot of things in a city that make noise and summon no one. Monitored alarms have real value, as any bank could probably tell you.
Yes, my road has a light gray gutter now, with bumps where parked car's tires were. I don't know how much is actually in the storm sewer, but I feel sorry for whoever has to clean that out next time. The work was done by a private contractor working on someone's house, and they were gone after a few days. Most of the mess left was in their process of leaving (I'd be loathe to call it "cleaning up"). If it was a city crew I would have complained, and perhaps something would have been done.
As someonw who has experienced major vandalism, including having all the windows broken out in a house we owned that was gutted and even amateur attempts at burning it down
I live in a city, and I think most alarms are simply pacifiers that serve no real purpose. Think about it; If the alarm went off numerous times and nobody ever came, then there obviously wasn't any enforcement. Someone could do whatever they want anyway. An alarm that doesn't summon a person around is next to useless. It won't stop someone from breaking your windows (nobody's going to come), and it won't stop them from burning the building down (can be done from outside). If the alarm summoned the cops every time it went off, it would at least provide some security, and I'm sure the construction company would have fixed its sensitivity, since then it would cost them money for all the false alarms.
If you don't like the alarm tell the guy about it and that it is bird and such setting it off so he can take actions to prevent entry to those birds and such.
You're assuming he didn't ask them already. He very likely did ask them, and they "didn't see a problem" (since they weren't there at night). I would also like to know the fantasy city you live in where construction companies care what "the neighbors" think anyway. Where I live, they run jackhammers first thing in the morning, large generators all day (often away from where they work but next to someone else's place), and pour excess concrete in the gutter, partially ruining the street.
Don't forget your part to help stem over-population by not having too many kids!
Really, I find it hard to respect an environmentalist who has four children. They may be energy-savvy, but I doubt they are *twice* as efficient as the Bush children. Plain and simple, we have way too many people, even if we all install fluorescent lighting and buy hybrids. If we don't stabilize and eventually decrease the population, nothing will save us.
most of the people who might use it can't contribute because they aren't developers.
That's an oft-repeated argument, but its a fallacy. There are numerous ways to help that don't require programming skills: - testing the program and giving feedback to developers - documentation/wikis - making a donation (money, computer hardware, etc) for a program you really like - web pages stating how you used program X to solve problem Y
Summary: I like Outlook, but its not available for Linux. Evolution doesn't work enough like it, and Microsoft is unlikely to release a Linux version of Outlook. Boo-hoo. Why can't we all get along?
I was kind of hoping for something a bit broader than one example heaped with a few generalities...
Beleive it or not this is pretty impressive. Computer vision gets quite difficult when you don't have a lot of pixels to work with, as the shapes are all "helpfully" smeared together by the imager. And with the cheap lenses in camera phones, edges can be smeared by more than one pixel. In some of my prior work doing vision systems for Sony Aibos for RoboCup, we had to deal with similar problems (find an orange ball in an image that may be only 3x2 pixels, while ignoring the boundaries between red and yellow objects). So, kudos for the technical achievement, and hopefully they find a better application than the cuecat:)
Maybe they look at the videos to find out if their soldiers are doing something wrong? If the soldiers post it openly, there's no reason their employer should not see what they are taking videos of. If the next Abu-Gharib-like scandal happens, it'd be best if the DoD already knew about it before it hits the New York Times, as then they can be prepared for the inevitable shitstorm. They can announce that they already have the soldiers/ex-soldiers in custody and have started the disciplinary review process, instead of saying "we have no idea". Honestly, do you expect the DoD not to read any possible source of information about conduct/misconduct? Should they not read newspapers too?
It's not so much compression as having variable resolution. The center of the retina has a much higher resolution than the periphery. Try to look 20 degrees away from some words and try to read them (without looking back). It takes some practice to focus your attention a different place than where you are looking, but it's not too bad once you get the hang of it. You'll notice that there is very little detail indeed beyond about 5 degrees from the center of focus. The problem with TV and monitor displays is that they don't know where the viewer(s) are looking, so they need high resolution everywhere. Thus the eye can get away with a much lower overall information rate in comparison.
I do find that 10Mb to be a little low as an estimate however, since each cell can likely provide more than 10 bits/sec of information, especially when it can fire up to 1k times per second. There is almost surely less than 1000 bits/sec/cell though, so its somewhere between 100Mb and 1Gb overall -- still ethernet speeds.
There is a only a little bit of processing/compression going on at the eye itself; Mainly some "center surround" processing that you can roughtly compare to an edge sharpening filter in an image editing program. Most of the real processing goes on in the occipital lobe in the back of your head, such as the V1 layer which is essentially a 2D computer, with edge finding at various angles for every location in the eye. That feeds into V2 and V3, which do quite a bit more processing and are a little less well understood. One interesting thing is that it seems our visual systems split up into "what" and "where" pathways that independently process the identity of objects and their position. Some individuals with localized brain injuries can tell you they see an objecy (such as a stapler), but can't tell you where it is, and vice versa with an injury to the "what" pathway. Overall the human visual system is absolutely amazing, and we have a long way to go to catch up with it.
P.S. I know a lot about the human visual system because I have done a fair amount of computer vision research, and graduated with a double major in Cognitive Psychology (aka how the brain works).
Do you realize that the Titan rockets burned 20,000 gal. of fuel per second (!) to go to the Moon.
Funny, Titan rockets never went to the moon. Apollo went to the moon. Please read your space history.
What we need is a new propulsion system, something like the ion thruster prototypes the Europeans got
You mean like the one the US developed and launched in the late 90s on Deep Space One? Yeah, too bad we don't have one of those. Please find out what is going on before you spout off on a rant.
The human race needs to go to the moon, and eventually it needs to stay. Here are some other things which were a waste of resources during their development, and without any immediate payoff:
- transoceanic ships (why go to another country, we have everything we need here!) - cars (horses were far better in the early years) - airplanes (think how many people spent their life savings working on one, and never made progress)
Please look at the US budget. NASA's entire budget is 0.7% of that, compared to 17% for defense and a whopping 40% for social security and health benefits. We could pay for NASA by spending 4% less on defense, or finding a way to decrease medical costs by 2%. Several drug companies could fund NASA in its entirety with their profits alone. Space exploration is not the "low hanging fruit" for saving money on the budget.
True, but the research grant requests can be much larger when you say you are going to do it in hardware:)
More realistically, perhaps they have already simulated some stuff and now want to scale it up drastically in size and speed. There isn't really enough detail in the article to tell how custom this is going to be. It could be anything from a Sun Niagara or a Connection Machine up to some custom designed parallel FPGA monster.
Slashdot Mirror
A correction on the above post: Both the papers do mention the RMP. Looks like I scanned the papers a bit too fast. One of the authors emailed me to set the record straight.
Please see this for background information.
PAK CHOOIE UNF
Preface: My lab has four Segway-RMPs (RMP = robotics mobility platform). I don't work with them directly, but I know quite a bit about the work being done.
:) The current owner of Xavier should throw him in there too; He looks very lonely now as he has been consigned to work on a robotic crane for several years now instead of roaming the halls of Wean or NSH.
The main advantage of the ballbot is that it can be narrower to fit in tight spaces. The footprint of an RMP isn't really any better than the other robots it replaces. The Segway's main advantages are that it is fast, it works outdoors, and it can carry fairly heavly loads. The ballbot looks like a work in progress, and the results in the paper do not indicate that the control is anywhere near as stable as the current Segways.
In the paper they state the inevitable demise of statically balanced robots, though I'm not sure I believe that. Balance controllers are not very friendly when they trip over objects on the floor - they drive faster and faster into the object until the object yields (i.e. breaks) or the robot cannot keep up, and eventually fall one way or the other. An angry Segway is thus not very pleasant. Balanced platforms do react nicely to disturbances at the top end, however. Ballbot will have to have a smooth cover so as not to get hooked on anything, which is another problem. Ultimately, I would not be suprised to eventually see semi-balanced bases: A statically stable robot that can hinge near the bottom for dynamic actions but can come to rest while holding a position.
Regarding the speed issue, I think I'd be happy to race an RMP against the ballbot. Even if directional changes are required for the Segway, it would be hard to beat it over a traversal of any length. Our lab is also at CMU, so a race is actually possible
Finally, it is quite a shame the paper doesn't even seem to acknowledge the existence of RMPs. Yes, they are not the original self-balancing robots, but they are the only one which is commercially available, and famous enough that they likely form the inspiration for this work. We've had the RMPs since 2003 (which the Segway HT obviously pre-dates), and the earliest ballbot paper was 2005.
do you have a mirror for that? I'm too lazy to look.
Yes, this is in fact quite old. I get about 50 spams/day, so new trends come to me pretty quickly. Here's some text from a spam I got in Feb 2004, with text that obviously came from a news site:
Minnesota, which can clinch a wild-card playoff spot with a loss by either Carolina or St. Louis this weekend, appeared on its way to retaking the lead. But a holding penalty on Birk -- the Vikings were flagged nine times for 78 yards -- wiped out a 16-yard run by Michael Bennett that would have given them the ball at the Green Bay 40 just before the 2-minute warning.
The Vikings (8-7), though, couldn't get what they needed from a pass defense that has struggled all season.
Government spokesman Raanan Gissin said four soldiers were killed.
Six people were taken to hospital -- four badly hurt, one with moderate injuries and one lightly injured, military sources said.
The sources said another soldier remained beneath the rubble.
Gissin said rescue operations were continuing Sunday night.
That must have been some football game...
No, but it could be the victory screen at the end of the game:
"Contratulations! Now you know what the name of the game means. Stare into the dark abyss and contemplate you past, present and future."
From the outside, we don't really know enough about their problems to suggest a solution. So, clearly the NSA should bring in an unbiased outside consultant, and brief him/her fully on every project that they need to accomodate. As an honest patriot, I am willing to volunteer.
I was referring to unmonitored alarms (or alarms monitored in theory but not in practice). There are a lot of things in a city that make noise and summon no one. Monitored alarms have real value, as any bank could probably tell you.
Yes, my road has a light gray gutter now, with bumps where parked car's tires were. I don't know how much is actually in the storm sewer, but I feel sorry for whoever has to clean that out next time. The work was done by a private contractor working on someone's house, and they were gone after a few days. Most of the mess left was in their process of leaving (I'd be loathe to call it "cleaning up"). If it was a city crew I would have complained, and perhaps something would have been done.
As someonw who has experienced major vandalism, including having all the windows broken out in a house we owned that was gutted and even amateur attempts at burning it down
I live in a city, and I think most alarms are simply pacifiers that serve no real purpose. Think about it; If the alarm went off numerous times and nobody ever came, then there obviously wasn't any enforcement. Someone could do whatever they want anyway. An alarm that doesn't summon a person around is next to useless. It won't stop someone from breaking your windows (nobody's going to come), and it won't stop them from burning the building down (can be done from outside). If the alarm summoned the cops every time it went off, it would at least provide some security, and I'm sure the construction company would have fixed its sensitivity, since then it would cost them money for all the false alarms.
If you don't like the alarm tell the guy about it and that it is bird and such setting it off so he can take actions to prevent entry to those birds and such.
You're assuming he didn't ask them already. He very likely did ask them, and they "didn't see a problem" (since they weren't there at night). I would also like to know the fantasy city you live in where construction companies care what "the neighbors" think anyway. Where I live, they run jackhammers first thing in the morning, large generators all day (often away from where they work but next to someone else's place), and pour excess concrete in the gutter, partially ruining the street.
See, now where's the biochem person when you need one?
The real question is, how does the green slime taste? I say we make it into convenient rectangular bars to help feed the populous.
Hi my name is Al Gore...
Don't forget your part to help stem over-population by not having too many kids!
Really, I find it hard to respect an environmentalist who has four children. They may be energy-savvy, but I doubt they are *twice* as efficient as the Bush children. Plain and simple, we have way too many people, even if we all install fluorescent lighting and buy hybrids. If we don't stabilize and eventually decrease the population, nothing will save us.
most of the people who might use it can't contribute because they aren't developers.
That's an oft-repeated argument, but its a fallacy. There are numerous ways to help that don't require programming skills:
- testing the program and giving feedback to developers
- documentation/wikis
- making a donation (money, computer hardware, etc) for a program you really like
- web pages stating how you used program X to solve problem Y
I guess Outlook can be considered pretty "exciting" if you run it for any length of time between patches...
Summary: I like Outlook, but its not available for Linux. Evolution doesn't work enough like it, and Microsoft is unlikely to release a Linux version of Outlook. Boo-hoo. Why can't we all get along?
I was kind of hoping for something a bit broader than one example heaped with a few generalities...
Surely you mean "phone-powered bar code scanning", ie using the phone to scan bar codes, not powering the phone by scanning bar codes...
Perhaps the product is aimed toward use IN SOVIET RUSSIA?
Beleive it or not this is pretty impressive. Computer vision gets quite difficult when you don't have a lot of pixels to work with, as the shapes are all "helpfully" smeared together by the imager. And with the cheap lenses in camera phones, edges can be smeared by more than one pixel. In some of my prior work doing vision systems for Sony Aibos for RoboCup, we had to deal with similar problems (find an orange ball in an image that may be only 3x2 pixels, while ignoring the boundaries between red and yellow objects). So, kudos for the technical achievement, and hopefully they find a better application than the cuecat :)
Maybe they look at the videos to find out if their soldiers are doing something wrong? If the soldiers post it openly, there's no reason their employer should not see what they are taking videos of. If the next Abu-Gharib-like scandal happens, it'd be best if the DoD already knew about it before it hits the New York Times, as then they can be prepared for the inevitable shitstorm. They can announce that they already have the soldiers/ex-soldiers in custody and have started the disciplinary review process, instead of saying "we have no idea". Honestly, do you expect the DoD not to read any possible source of information about conduct/misconduct? Should they not read newspapers too?
It's not so much compression as having variable resolution. The center of the retina has a much higher resolution than the periphery. Try to look 20 degrees away from some words and try to read them (without looking back). It takes some practice to focus your attention a different place than where you are looking, but it's not too bad once you get the hang of it. You'll notice that there is very little detail indeed beyond about 5 degrees from the center of focus. The problem with TV and monitor displays is that they don't know where the viewer(s) are looking, so they need high resolution everywhere. Thus the eye can get away with a much lower overall information rate in comparison.
I do find that 10Mb to be a little low as an estimate however, since each cell can likely provide more than 10 bits/sec of information, especially when it can fire up to 1k times per second. There is almost surely less than 1000 bits/sec/cell though, so its somewhere between 100Mb and 1Gb overall -- still ethernet speeds.
There is a only a little bit of processing/compression going on at the eye itself; Mainly some "center surround" processing that you can roughtly compare to an edge sharpening filter in an image editing program. Most of the real processing goes on in the occipital lobe in the back of your head, such as the V1 layer which is essentially a 2D computer, with edge finding at various angles for every location in the eye. That feeds into V2 and V3, which do quite a bit more processing and are a little less well understood. One interesting thing is that it seems our visual systems split up into "what" and "where" pathways that independently process the identity of objects and their position. Some individuals with localized brain injuries can tell you they see an objecy (such as a stapler), but can't tell you where it is, and vice versa with an injury to the "what" pathway. Overall the human visual system is absolutely amazing, and we have a long way to go to catch up with it.
P.S. I know a lot about the human visual system because I have done a fair amount of computer vision research, and graduated with a double major in Cognitive Psychology (aka how the brain works).
You will be assimilated. Netcraft confirms it.
If your house burns down you physically have to buy / restore the current one with hard earned cash.
Are you saying you don't make regular backups of your house? Man, you are really tempting fate.
Do you realize that the Titan rockets burned 20,000 gal. of fuel per second (!) to go to the Moon.
Funny, Titan rockets never went to the moon. Apollo went to the moon. Please read your space history.
What we need is a new propulsion system, something like the ion thruster prototypes the Europeans got
You mean like the one the US developed and launched in the late 90s on Deep Space One? Yeah, too bad we don't have one of those. Please find out what is going on before you spout off on a rant.
The human race needs to go to the moon, and eventually it needs to stay. Here are some other things which were a waste of resources during their development, and without any immediate payoff:
- transoceanic ships (why go to another country, we have everything we need here!)
- cars (horses were far better in the early years)
- airplanes (think how many people spent their life savings working on one, and never made progress)
Please look at the US budget. NASA's entire budget is 0.7% of that, compared to 17% for defense and a whopping 40% for social security and health benefits. We could pay for NASA by spending 4% less on defense, or finding a way to decrease medical costs by 2%. Several drug companies could fund NASA in its entirety with their profits alone. Space exploration is not the "low hanging fruit" for saving money on the budget.
True, but the research grant requests can be much larger when you say you are going to do it in hardware :)
More realistically, perhaps they have already simulated some stuff and now want to scale it up drastically in size and speed. There isn't really enough detail in the article to tell how custom this is going to be. It could be anything from a Sun Niagara or a Connection Machine up to some custom designed parallel FPGA monster.
How dare you bring such a "legal analysis". It has no place here, this is Slashdot; a utopian non-RTFM collective.