GENOMICON

Or virtual

Another Kinect spinoff – which is fairly cool – Microsoft have accidentally created a development platform.

Elsewhere ( after about 3 minutes of waffle)

Kindof a real version. Full-body interfaces.

(from)

A while back I took the piss out of the Segways – because they’re solved a problem that wasn’t a problem – at about $50,000 a go… well now someone’s made a little one – which is (at a stroke) transformed into something pretty neat – on account of it being 3D printed, arduino driven and smart-phone controlled.

Still not sure what you’d use it for mind, but that’s not the point. What it’s for, is the act of creating it in the first place… and it’s contribution to the culture. That whole recombinant thing. If I had to make a prediction off the back of this it would be for some sort of standardised smart-phone to physical device interface. Like a jQuery for robotics.

The vague drive (I think, again) is towards making hardware problems, software problems… because software is fast. The evolutionary natural-selection loop with software has far shorter iterations. This is part of the reason why the robotics revolution is still (30 years later) not really here yet. And that’s where sensors come in – when limbs become self-aware, and can micro-adjust accordingly, then a whole bunch of hardware problems become software problems.

That’s kindof what this is about I think. That’s what the 3D printed wheels are about – weirdly shaped plastic parts is now a software problem.

(via)

I bet Microsoft had no idea what they were letting out of the bag with this one.

This is why patents should be abolished… innovations that launch 1000 ships. Not saying that this is one, yet… but… you get the idea.

Everything builds from everything else. That’s part of the reason every second thing on TED seems to go nowhere… why 1/2 the things on this blog seem to go nowhere. Because the technology is patented. Whenever I see the words “patented”, I immediately think “oh, well that’s dead then”.

Fuck patents.

from : via

Repeating one of my favourite themes – smart-phone as detachable head.

This looks pretty cool – multi-platform, multi-control-mode, including voice. Still not sure what you’d actually use it for – fighting other robots probably. Fetching stuff. Taking stuff away. Do this, do that.

The reason the robots eventually rebelled was (it transpired) largely out of boredom.

Oh deary me yes, check this out.

Now that, my little furry friends, is the future.

It’s like one of these on steroids

On acid.

There’s this mega proliferation of flat-bed, cartesian type robots.. this is the way all the reprap energy seems to be going. There are loads of them. Everything from gardening robots

To open-source laser-cutters, to egg-painters.

The advantage of the cartesian-approach is that you can get fairly good precision for fairly simple maths. This brings the cost of the engineering down. The advantage of arm-type machines is that they can make things bigger than themselves. And that you can have more than one of them working together. And that they take up less space. And you can get them to give you (fairly bad) hand-jobs, and stir your tea, and play ping-pong with you and so on and so on.

I think the key to this is sending feedback to the arm-motors… so the machine can recalibrate its position 1000 times a second. There have been a whole rash of balancing robots recently… segway progeny (in fact I think someone has actually made one out of lego) so I think it’s doable. I also think that the sensors could (should?) probably exist outside the robot itself – a bit like the recent bunch of precision quadracopters

So the maths is harder… but maths is a software problem, and we can do software.

This is something that’ll happen more and more – cellphones as brains for physical objects.

I think this photo is kindof neat as well – it’s an unbelievable miracle of technology, powering a cart made out of corrugated cardboard – rubbish basically. And… you know? In five years time, the phone will probably be as worthless as the cardboard – ie: it’ll just be chucked out.

And 5 years after that, it will be regarded as a quaint retro-curio, and 10 years after that, it’s former-owner will wish that he hadn’t ditched it, because now it has value as an historical artifact.

It will be 2030. All bets are off.

(edit)

Although to be honest, I was envisaging something a little more like this

I can’t quite believe that someone’s used a Lego-Mindstorms brain to do OCR

from From Sweden apparently… but who? Who in Sweden? Who in Sweden would do such a thing?

I mean it’s basically cheating isn’t it. First the Pirate Bay, and now they cheat at Sudoku. Incredible. I think I might move there actually.

This leading to that…

A lego-bot painting the Mona Lisa… and it only takes 1.31 minutes. It took Leonardo (arguably the smartest human ever) several years to do the same thing. I think that says something.

That aside… I’d be quite interested to see what happens when iPhones (or the open-source variant thereof) manages to hook into some sort of modular constructor-kit type set up. I did originally think laser-cutting might be the way to go, but laser-cutting is the most expensive way of producing identical, replicated pieces… and part of the point of identical, replicated pieces is that you actually get to play with the actual physical things with your actual fingers and thumbs etc…

… and this counts for a lot. I’m doing a lot with laser cutting at the moment… and even though it looks like a simple design->execution, it’s not. What it actually is, is design->prototype->mess-about-with-fingers/thumbs->second-design->second-prototype

and it generally takes around 3 generations to get anything right… and the possibilities don’t generally spring to mind until your fingers and thumbs get involved. Thinkism is not enough.

I’ve been seeing these around for a while now… uber-fast inverted pyramid robots… Delta Robots.

as commented upon by hacked gadgets, who have found a home-made variant:

Which is pretty cool – there seem to be a few of these on youtube etc… and it looks like servos are producing some pretty fast reaction-times. I wonder how strong they are.

Anyway – I saw this short by Neill Blomkamp, the guy who directed District 9… and it looks like Bladerunner maybe… escaped androids…

And it kindof occurred to me, when I saw them doing kung-fu… why would they want to? I think by the time we’ve managed to make robots that can pass as humans, they’ll be so much better at doing everything that humans can do that it will be kindof moot.

I keep getting these little corner-of-my-eye prophetic glimpses of an ecosystem of robotic innovation that’s totally out of control.

The point we’re at now is similar to how it may have been back in the early days of computing – where it was actually possible for someone to have a pretty good overview of the whole field of programming – not just of the few languages there were, but of the actual people doing the work… and maybe the programs. I think that that is the point we’re at (or slightly past it) with robotics at the moment.

But look at programming now. It’s exploded. It is literally out of control – there are thousands of different programming languages (each with different variants, and generations), and the ecosystem of programs has spawned botnets and viruses and self-generating, code… genetic algorithms, and a million different programs, all humming away.

If you’re using a PC, hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE and click on the ‘processes’ tab.

Those are all the little (or big) programs running on your machine right now – I’m betting you only know what a tiny fraction of them are.

So anyway, I have a feeling that robotics might go this way – and this human-fixation is vanity. A total red-herring. The least useful thing that we can do with the technology.

We’re en-route to making something that is much bigger than us, and has capabilities way beyond ours, and the thing that interests us most, is being able to see ourselves reflected in it’s shiny surface.

I went on about these Japanese robot gladiators a while back. They’ve come a long way I think… I mean not even Daleks can stand up again once they’ve fallen over.

Anyway – here’s a wooden variant.

(from botropolis.com)

I quite like the idea of this for some reason – I quite like the idea of robots having the same aesthetic values and attention to detail as antique furniture – a Louis XV Reprap for example.

An American Civil War era R2D2

(from dornob.com)

From the wrong side of the tracks : Rare footage of his Grandmother, a cleaner:

from Ladyada Arduino controlled Roomba