This is the difference between “memory” systems (like CNC) and sensor-controlled systems. The feedback loop is where its at. Once you have a feedback loop you can start applying genetic algorithms to problems – and basically create a one-solution-fits-all approach to creating things.
I was over the other side of the country yesterday – small town in NZ (ok the 14th biggest, but it’s still small)… and the engineer guy that I’m getting to build my next project told me there were 8 other firms that do CNC-controlled metal-folding in town. His own shop was large-garage sized. Single office, couple of people attending the machines. Similar sized operation to one I just visited in my own town – who have a 9-axis CNC machine. The guy who I was talking to talked a lot about a “lights-out” operation… basically you set the machine up, leave for the night, come back in the morning and its basket contains 100s of things that its made.
Meantime, I occasionally get parts made for me in China – 5000 units at a time. I talk to someone named Jane… and we swap photos of our cats etc. I was picturing something similar – but I saw a brochure the other day and their plant looks like the matrix – machines arrayed to infinity in all directions.
So while we still have a planet, that looks to me like the shape of manufacturing – small, local high-tech shops that can make pretty much anything… and massive automated plants somewhere else on the planet that can deal with huge scales. Whether there’s anyone left who can afford to buy any of these products is another matter… and I guess that’s where the DIY stuff comes in… but I don’t think DIY is ever going to catch up with the high-tech end of things.
Unless it starts using sensor-feedback loops and genetic algorithms. Repraps always were about evolution. Natural-selection is built into the model. Kindof makes sense that the software itself uses natural selection at a much lower level, so the process of machine-creation is much more organic.
In the future we’ll have robots that vacuum your carpet when you wave your arms around and yell at them. Admittedly this does take longer and use more energy than just doing the vacuuming yourself, but it’s good exercise and in a fucked up sort of way, quite fun, especially if you dress up as a bigger robot yourself.
Still – never mind about that… I was going to go on about this robotic mayfly I saw before, but now it’s gone and I can’t find it, so here are some vids of flying things
Little copter that can fly round the house making a noise like a mosquito from hell, “learning” where all your stuff is.
The computer is onboard so it can do stuff on its own… and it has cages around the props (that look a bit like those cages people use to stop babies escaping… but smaller) so it can fly about inside without injuring itself.
I think Kinect is a new game or something from Microsoft – something to do with retards – I don’t really understand it – but then I didn’t understand Wii either, or guitar-hero, or those video games that tiny Japanese people dance on. I understand Space-Invaders. Space Invaders understand me. And we hate each other.
Anyway the Kinect hacks absolutely fucking rock – what it’s being used for (as far as I can tell) is 3D edge-recognition…
This one where they’ve fused it onto a roomba is pretty neat – reminds me of the Swedish roomba hack from earlier this year, where the roomba cruised around the room indexing your stuff so you could google it later, when you can’t fucking find stuff because someone’s taken it and I don’t know why they keep doing that. It’s not in the Roomba. I’ve checked. Jesus.
Being a clairvoyant, I’d expect to see some sort of smart-phone, kinect hybrid at some point – probably as a phone accessory – unless the phones start getting bi-focal abilities… which is probably on the cards, assuming it’s not all tied down with future-damaging patents, which it probably is.
Speaking of which… here’s a video of a microcopter
Mostly consisting of vitamin parts, granted, but there is this growing tendency for hardware problems to become software problems – and software is an vibrant and insane pscycho-ecosystem of evolution. It’s like the amazon on weird fast drugs – all the drugs that probably grow in the amazon that it deliberately takes to make it weirder and faster than it already was. Software is the only ecosystem I know of that is consciously speeding itself up.
Anyway, I was talking to Josh the other day (or at him. He didn’t reply), and had this minor vision of an internet where devices could communicate via anything that vibrations could travel through – like tapping on pipes. They could lip-read Hal-like across the room. They could flash LEDs at each other, or ping each other with radio-waves etc etc… for international speed, obviously the fastest way would still be centrally owned (and controlled by scarcity-head) pipelines… but the internet of things could well be a massive, ever-adapting mesh network that absolutely no one could censor or control – which is vital I think, the work-ethic of evil being what it is. The internet is too important for it to be controlled by anything inherently disposed towards dishonesty as governments or corporations.
And further to that… really cheap wifi-routing robots – probably microcopters, that charge up in the sun, the fly off to the point of minimum coverage, while still being part of a link… avoiding each other like electrons, or strangers sitting next to each other on the bus.
This kinect thing possibly takes that idea further – robots that can do what google-street-view does but in real-time. Would we want that? Christ no. We could do it though – that thing I was on about earlier about some Australian security firm making a real-time 3D model of a dock or something – that you could virtually fly-through, just got a whole lot closer. War and tourism. And games. War and tourism becoming even more gamelike than they already are.
It would be fantastic for autonomous bio-monitoring (which actually is a good idea). A while back someone at TED talked about doing this with cellphones – but spacially aware cheapo-copters might do it better – and if they were mesh-networked, it would be like The Universal mind acquiring a sensory organ not a million miles away from a skin – a planet-wide sense of touch.
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Next Week: Robot on Robot predation. It started with the greed-heads trying to control the mesh, but wound up biting their arses all the way back to the Pleistocene.
This is exactly the sort of thing I like the most.
It’s a tiny 3d printed helicopter, the design for which was arrived at using genetic algorithms.
Absolutely brilliant – machines that can design themselves using inner-simulations. Almost. There’s nothing to say that a “machine” shouldn’t have appendages that aren’t actually attached to the brain… we’re just used to creatures being “one-piece”. I think it’s a whole lot more likely that robotic creatures are actually thin-client.
Like we are… now that we can no longer cope without having 24/7 access to the web.
There’s a video of it here hovering about in the dude’s grandmother’s place that is filled with delicately balanced china and crystal ornaments, just waiting for a small helicopter to crash into them, in slow motion – the severed heads of porcelain bambies somersalting through the air – through a tinkling holocaust of crystal shards and flaming scraps of lace doily… thimbles, teaspoons… three generations of family wedding portraits looking on, the smiles now strangely absent from their eyes.
The other thing I find interesting about this though – the grass in the photo at the top – is that grass or astrotorf? It seems very even for grass… a bit rough for a pool table top… so… astroturf? Or is it carpet? Very grass-like carpet. I mean my carpet is green, but it’s not as green as that. Unless… unless they are actually using astroturf as carpet, in which case they soar (like a quadrocopter) in my estimation. That is pretty hardcore IMHO. Astroturf as carpet? It’s like using number-8 wire to lace your boots with.
Nice little quadrocopter though. There’s something that just seems “right” about it.
Where some MIT people have sortof made or sortof not made this thing where these little microcopters arrange themselves in a grid which can then be controlled like pixels in a 3D holographic display
with a curiously 1970s design aesthetic.
I’m not sure about this one – the little helicopters look cool but any video that starts with the word “Imagine” just makes me feel used and manipulated. Unclean etc. Like I should go out and mow the lawns to get my sense of self back. I am not a Mac.
So there’s a solution looking for a problem if ever I saw one. Cool thing to do though. They’re like self-motile throwies – inevitable in some ways. It’s utterly fucking inevitable that they get used in some uber-prat billion dollar “rock” concert – probably U2… and there’s a gust of wind which results in a massive micro-copter crash… and they go careening into the crowd and get tangled up in the back-combed hair of the hapless and sheep-like fans – who stampede – for the exits, for the fire-escapes, for the stage… in all directions at once. Carnage. Utter carnage… and 15 minutes later, all that’s left is the aftermath of a medieval battle-scene with torn limbs and broken bodies, still eerily illuminated by thousands of humming, hovering LEDs.
So apparently the open-source robot people who made that fairly remarkable thing that wanders about the place plugging itself into wall-points…
… are giving away a load of them, to people who can come up with the best ideas for what they might actually be used for.
So what does this tell you?
A while back I started collecting examples of ‘Search and Rescue‘ robots – which are basically cool machines that people have made, but once they’ve made them, can’t think of anything to use them for other than spying on people or finding them when they’re lost.
Anyway, here we are, hell-bent, racing forward at a phenomenal pace, creating this revolution… which we know we want, but we don’t know what for. So we make stuff like this:
Which is fair enough I suppose. A kid’s toy. Hopefully.
A kid’s toy with 18 servos and gyroscopes and more smarts than it took to land a man on the moon back in the 60s (ok, massive exaggeration, but you get the point).
But what are these things actually for? What did C3P0 actually do? He was a translator… yea, there’s an iPhone app for that. R2D2? A cross between an upturned dustbin and… an iPhone… with script-kiddie-level hacking software… a rootkit bot. R2D2 had viruses.
I know that industrial robots have gotten to be so advanced that they could probably make themselves from scratch… but they’re not the ones getting all the attention. The ones that aren’t terribly good for anything are.
So. My theory. The (or at least A) killer-app of robotics is…
… drum roll…
… the ability to make us think we’re flying.
I’ve never seen a gadget generate so much twitter excitement as this thing:
A little quadro-copter that you control with your iphone… and crucially, you see what it sees.
These have been around for a while in various guises, but this was the first one to really make a splash. There’s a variant here:
Which is scarier looking, but tough enough to carry a hi-def camera
Clocking in at around $415 – although you can probably add a bit to that. Still… no worries, the prices of these things are plummeting.
So anyway, the ability to fly is a real killer-app in my opinion… and in a lot of ways, being able to do it remotely is an advantage – ie: you don’t die. This design from Nasa for example looks great, but your head is inches away from 4 blades that are spinning fast enough to turn you into salami.
And it’s 5 metres wide, and will absolutely kill anything that gets in its way.
There was some discussion recently about what a real physics-obedient space-fighter would be like… and one of the things said was that there wouldn’t be windows because of the disorientation created by flipping about in zero-g, and the massive glare/darkness created by nearby stars/the void etc. So instead you’d have screens that showed (via camera) what was outside.
Well if you’re going to do that, you may as well not be in the spaceship at all. You might as well be in a flotation tank somewhere – allowing your spaceship to withstand g-forces, temperature, radiation etc etc that you couldn’t deal with yourself.
But I digress… I think that first-person, remote controlled microcopters are going to be a killer-app of the robotics revolution – not for search and rescue, but because everyone wants to be able to fly… and first-personism allows you to feel like you are, without risk of injury. Unless you crash into your own face or something.
You could use them for meetings… fly off to your office, and sit around in a circle with the other gyrocopters all going “heh heh heh heh”.
You could send them off to the shops to get crisps, beer, fags etc, so you wouldn’t have to get out of your flotation tank.
You could set them up so when another gyrocopter sees you, augmented reality kicks in so it sees you, “at your best” when you’ve tidied yourself up a bit, and not as you really are… a little black helicopter, or someone lying starkers in a flotation tank, surrounded by spilled crisps, empty beer bottles and fag-ends.
