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Posted by dan michaels on October 2, 2007, 12:16 pm
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>
> > Do you know whether the "spider" had its own visual processing on
> > board, or was connected to a remore PC?
>
> It was connected to a remote PC.
>
Yeah.
Now, THAT is cheating, if you want to talk about cheating :).
>
> > > And yes, of course it's mainly whimsy -- but let he whose robot actually
> > > does something useful cast the first stone. Personally I think giving
> > > up on the idea of building a robot that's actually useful is a key
> > > milestone in one's journey through hobby robotics.
>
> > Say what?
>
> > How about a robot that can patrol your house when you're away
> > from home, and send pictures of intruders directly to the internet.
>
> I'm in the camp that considers remote-controlled vehicles to be more,
> well, RC vehicles than robots. :) But I do recognize that they face
> many of the same engineering problems and there is a great deal of
> crossover in the two hobbies.
>
I'm talking about autonomous control for the patrol bot, not remote
control.
>
> Now, a robot that patrols your home on its own, recognizes any people it
> sees, and gives you a call on your cell phone if anybody comes in that
> it doesn't know -- THAT would start to border on a useful robot. Though
> only marginally so; it would be simpler and probably more cost-effective
> to just put a camera in each room with a home entrance. And most people
> would say that this simpler solution is not a robot, since it has no
> moving parts.
>
Actually, in my opinion, a camera in every room is wasteful #1, and
extremely
intrusive of family member privacy #2. No one wants this.
We're roboticists, not home security technicians, after all. A well
designed
security robot will seek out sounds such as breaking windows,
recognize
intruders using PIR and motion sensors, and send pictures to the
internet
from anywheres in the house.
You don't immediately need facial recognition in order to build
something
useful.
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