

Anybots' Dexter the star of Robo Development - pg
http://www.news.com/8301-13772_3-9804720-52.html?tag=nefd.blgs

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kirubakaran
[http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2176/1763508649_857218800d_o....](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2176/1763508649_857218800d_o.jpg)

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chaostheory
to this day, what impressed me most about dexter wasn't his legs, but his
hand(s). for some reason i just never realized the complicated beauty of human
hands until i took a look at dexter's hands. it's tricky to build something
with a strong grip, yet simultaneously not crush everything it holds (not to
mention keeping the weight low)...

I really hope anybots makes it one day, because it has an even harder road
ahead since they're not willing to even think about showing it off to the
military for ethical reasons (which i respect them for)

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chmike
Very interesting. You really should contact sponsors. Consider Nike or Addidas
so you can give more credible shoes ;-) Sportswear sponsoring should also be
considered. At least for socks.

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abstractbill
"Anybots says Dexter can go wherever people can go, including climbing stairs
and ladders."

Has a ladder been tried yet? That'd be awesome to see.

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ecuzzillo
Uh, we didn't say that. We said _our robots_ _will eventually_ be able to go
wherever people can go, including stairs and maybe ladders. They currently are
restricted to floors with small random crap on them.

The point of the wherever-people-can-go idea is that the whole Anybots vision
of the robotics market in the next 20 years is that AI won't be production-
ready, but teleoperated robots will certainly be production ready. So, we
merely have to design robots and software that can smoothly allow a remote
operator to behave as if (s)he is actually in the environment the robot is in,
and perform tasks that way. In particular, this involves going most places
people can go.

So, we have a big bank of monitors that displays a big panorama fusing all of
Monty's cameras, so the operator can see what's going on, and a glove and
backpack operation that allows the operator's movements to be sent back to the
robot.

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ivankirigin
Is the basic idea for third world operators to cheaply run humanoid fronts?

How will you deal with lag in places of the world where internet might not be
fast enough but wages are cheap enough?

Or, are you planning on going into dangerous services, and replace a human?

How are you planning on making the bot rugged? Also, exactly how many pixels
do you expect to ship? Deployed robots in Iraq send a highly compressed
320x240 color stream -- maybe two.

There is an awesome system by Chatten Associates that might be relevant to
Anybots. They have a fast pan-tilt camera with analog broadcast to minimize
latency to a tele-operator. The operator has a head mounted display with
gyros, and here is the kicker: the gyros control the pan-tilt. This means that
the camera looks where the human is looking. It's amazingly immersive. Even a
small field of view camera works well.
<http://www.chattenassociates.com/docs/bob.html>

Network latency is an even bigger problem with this kind of system. Operators
vomit with lag greater than ~150ms.

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ecuzzillo
On lag: I would imagine that the first teleoperation centers would come from
places where sufficient internet connectivity was already in place, and then
as the market grew, it would become profitable for service companies to create
internet infrastructure in places where wages are lower.

Yes, we envision the first applications being dangerous services. The idea is,
at any given time, for any given task, there is a ratio of how long it takes a
teleoperated robot to do the task to how long it would take a human. Currently
this ratio is maybe 10:1, and a good part of the work in the next couple of
years will be reducing that ratio. It's likely to be cost-effective, though,
to send robots to dangerous places even when the ratio is high; then, as the
ratio nears 1:1, it becomes reasonable to use such robots for household tasks.
Then, as we develop autonomy for individual tasks, the ratio will start to go
below 1, because an operator can set a robot on one task, switch robots, set a
second robot on a task, etc.

We haven't really looked into ruggedizing the thing, partly because Anybots
eventually wants to mostly be in the software end of the industry, rather than
manufacturing hardware. The point of the prototypes is to provide a platform
to prove the quality of the software, and then find manufacturing partners to
help make the robots bulletproof and production-ready.

Number of pixels is similarly up in the air, depending on how many we think
are necessary to accomplish a given task. Monty's current setup has an array
of fixed, cheap cameras, because it's easier to just have a whole bunch of
cameras than to have a complicated expensive pan-tilt operation with one
camera. One way of reducing the required bandwidth would be to create an
option just to ship a user-selected region of the panorama, the one relevant
to the current task. For navigation, maybe we could downsample the panorama to
provide a wide-angle view of the scene. (The above is all speculation, by the
way.)

I'm not totally sure I agree that latency is so terrible. Currently, our
operators mostly move the arms pretty slowly, to avoid nonintuitive dynamic
effects of pneumatic actuators. I would imagine that if you had to move your
arm and wait a fraction of the second for the visual feedback, it wouldn't be
so terrible. It would slow things down, but I don't think it would kill you.

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ivankirigin
Cool!

Kara is a bit of a Bozo, but it's good to see anybots closer to business.

