

Robots at the Intersection of Cool and Useful - hugs
http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/robots-at-the-intersection-of-cool-and-useful

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stephengillie
This article exactly describes the startling realization I had last October
when I first used Arduino: all of the parts exist to create robots; they just
have to be put together.

 _We have all kinds of sensors which can take information about the world and
turn it into voltage pulses._

 _We have all kinds of motors and servos which can take voltage pulses and
move._

 _We have microcontrollers and microprocessors which can use voltage pulses as
digital input, and output digital signals as voltage pulses. Also these are
robust enough to count microseconds and run several-thousand-line programs._

With these few parts, we can build numerous input loops. My favorite is having
a motor scale output based on the input given from a distance sensor, so an RC
car will slow as it approaches a wall. I have done this in ~40 lines of code.
I want to see just how much can be done with ~4000 lines of code.

I am currently building a self-driving trash can from an RC car, Arduino, some
sensors, and code I've hacked together. I have dreams of building robots that
swap HDDs for rackmount servers and also building seeing-eye robots. While
many hackers find satisfaction in seeing their code run on servers or be used,
I find it much more enjoyable to see my code rolling across the floor.

~~~
Symmetry
And if you want to get more advanced, there's this great open source
framework... <http://www.ros.org/wiki/>

~~~
hugs
Yes, totally. ROS support is definitely on my watch list, especially for
getting an OpenGL virtual representation of what the bot is doing. I like the
idea of ROS -- a publish/subscribe hub of messages between every thing on a
robot -- however, I don't know if I'm going to love the actual implementation.
It feels like Too Much Code. But again, I'm speaking from non-experience
actually using ROS.

