

Berkeley - The Future of Robotics (Sexy) - rwaliany
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKUaVzf3Oqw

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kmfrk
Heard near a Berkeley restroom:

"So, are you inferring the same grasp point as I am?"

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beambot
That video was part of a video competition sponsored by the robotics startup
Willow Garage's founder. The Berkeley video won first place (and $5000). You
can find the full listing of submitted videos (including the $3000 and $2000
second and third place contestants) on Hizook.com:

[http://www.hizook.com/blog/2010/08/21/pr2-video-contest-
resu...](http://www.hizook.com/blog/2010/08/21/pr2-video-contest-
results-10k-aggregate-cash-prizes)

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tlammens
I guess some entrepreneur can find some other use to commercialize this bot.

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archangel_one
That's faintly disappointing to me - a human can turn a sock inside out nearly
instantly and without some convenient pole. The image recognition stuff about
figuring out where to grasp it seems cleverer but it's still a little
offputting to me because it all seems so contrived.

I guess I shouldn't be so down on it - there must be some pretty clever stuff
in there. The image recognition problem seems harder to solve to me than the
dexterity one.

I'm not sure where it becomes sexy. I guess the pole is faintly phallic, but
as far as I'm concerned for a robot to be sexy it would need to look like
Cameron out of Sarah Connor Chronicles. If the Berkeley researchers managed
that then the future would really be here.

~~~
electromagnetic
I'd ditto the 'I'm not sure where it becomes sexy'. I suppose putting a sock
on a pole is one step away from putting a condom on a penis, but it takes
roughly 5-minutes to put a loosely elasticated sock onto a pole. It would
probably take the better part of a week to put a condom on a penis.

So really, this wouldn't be in the least bit sexy or even sexually useful.
Perhaps it'll find use treating hypersensitive premature ejaculators with a
robo-fetish, but I sincerely doubt this is a step closer to the sex-bots that
have been predicted forever.

Someone seriously needs to seek out female companionship, even if it's just an
old playboy stuffed under the corner of their mattress, if they found that in
anyway sexual.

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ajscherer
The video is certainly suggestive, but I wouldn't call it sexy. To each his
own I guess.

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electromagnetic
Imagine it 15x slower, I doubt it would even look suggestive anymore.

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jonah
15x speedup. What is the bottleneck that it's taking > 15x longer for it to do
this task than a human?

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houseabsolute
Probably mostly that motors which are

    
    
        - small,
        - accurate,
        - fast, and
        - cheap
    

do not exist.

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savrajsingh
RC servos meet all of those requirements, wouldn't you agree?

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beambot
No, I would not. RC servos cannot follow specifically-defined trajectories,
otherwise known as splines (ie. be at encoder position X at time Y), as RC
servos rely on very basic (analog) position feedback.

Some of the lowest-level PR2 controllers require the specification of splines
to achieve accurate motion.

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wyclif
It's only a matter of time before one of these kills somebody.

