

2011: The Year of the Personal Robot? - Rickasaurus
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=personal-robot-research

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kiba
The PR2 robot seem to be overpowered and overengineered, making it cost too
much.

I think the robot could do better by being easily producible by hobbyists and
by using off the shelf component.

That being said, I am not an electrical engineer.

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psilokan
Agreed, no reason for this thing to have 8 core processors and insane amounts
of RAM. It's not like this thing is sentient, there's only so much data to
process.

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lukeschlather
I've done some work on image processing and read a substantial amount of
literature, and nowhere have I seen anyone seriously trying to achieve
sentience.

I have seen people using 30 node clusters where every node has roughly the
processing power of this robot to track a ball with two cameras. Now, this was
undergrad stuff and certainly could have been done better, but I'm sure the
engineers who built this robot knew what it needed to do its job.

It's done as cheaply as anyone has done it up to now, which is important.
Though it probably is still too expensive to be widely used, it sounds like a
good step towards research to bring down costs to a reasonable level for
consumer use.

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erikstarck
A common platform for robot development could really boost innovation in
robotics. I smell disruption.

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rman666
Sorry, there will be no disruption in personal robotics for many years. There
have been articles proclaiming the year of the personal robot for at least a
decade. The biggest problems in personal robotics are not computer hardware or
software, but mechanical components and actuators. It still costs too much to
build something that doesn't get boring after a week of working with it. Look
at the Abio. It was beautiful but it got boring after a week because it
couldn't do anything. Why not? Because it was too limited mechanically. If it
was simply a matter of more computer power, there'd be people people hacking
on more powerful processors and more memory, but there aren't. People want
there $10K personal robot to be able to do something more useful than running
a demo program. That requires power and robust and flexible mechanical system
that can mimic what people can do. It may even require new materials (muscle
wire, anyone?). Just my 2-cents.

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erikstarck
It got boring because it wasn't part of a platform that could extend it - or
be extended by it. It's like an operating system that only has a drawing
program.

Edit: let's say the Aibo was an open sourced software plus blueprints for a
3D-printer. Anyone who wanted a "walking"-component for their robot could
simply download it and build and extend it themselves. You could even run the
entire thing in an emulator and then just press "print" when you wanted it in
the physical world.

Now that _is_ disruption.

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rman666
Yeah, we saw a lot of that happen with the Abio.

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bradhe
What about the Linux desktop :(

