5 ms·

My first reaction: How much time and money did this cost? How is this benefiting anything? Is this a test of some operating system that will be used on other, m

My first reaction: How much time and money did this cost? How is this benefiting anything? Is this a test of some operating system that will be used on other, more useful things, or just a science project?

anamax 17y ago
> Is this a test of some operating system that will be used on other, more useful things, or just a science project? You say that like science projects don't lead to anything useful.... or Everything is a science project until it ships.
drunkpotato 17y ago
Huh, how supremely uninteresting your first reaction is. I wish you hadn't shared your useless ungeekly feelings. But now that you have, I will share my first reaction: Cool! Robotics is hard. We are just beginning to understand the amount of processing that goes into the simplest movement of living beings. We are still in the infancy of reverse engineering millions of years of evolution, and it is a wondrous new frontier of research!
nzmsv 17y ago
Yes, universities do science. And cool projects. If they had to immediately sell whatever they invented, most research would never happen.
detcader 17y ago
I'm just saying, I don't see how this is efficient outside of "can we make a robot that folds towels?" Sure, it's pretty cool, even putting aside its slowness, but it seems like a lot of effort towards something with little application. When you're just /learning/ robotics you're supposed to experiment and make useless stuff, but this seems like a professional project. I guess I'm not familiar with the whole world of robots-- maybe this stuff is normal and fine I'm thinking too much at 3 AM..
- waterlesscloud 17y ago
  The robot is picking up an object with a deformable geometry, analyzing that geometry, and then using that data to manipulate that geometry in a desired fashion. It does this with a series of objects of different sizes, shapes, and colorations. It was presumably not familiar with these particular objects ahead of time. There's a lot going on here, and it's valuable to have done it.

anamax 17y ago

> Is this a test of some operating system that will be used on other, more useful things, or just a science project? You say that like science projects don't lead to anything useful.... or Everything is a science project until it ships.

drunkpotato 17y ago

Huh, how supremely uninteresting your first reaction is. I wish you hadn't shared your useless ungeekly feelings. But now that you have, I will share my first reaction: Cool! Robotics is hard. We are just beginning to understand the amount of processing that goes into the simplest movement of living beings. We are still in the infancy of reverse engineering millions of years of evolution, and it is a wondrous new frontier of research!

nzmsv 17y ago

Yes, universities do science. And cool projects. If they had to immediately sell whatever they invented, most research would never happen.

detcader 17y ago

I'm just saying, I don't see how this is efficient outside of "can we make a robot that folds towels?" Sure, it's pretty cool, even putting aside its slowness, but it seems like a lot of effort towards something with little application. When you're just /learning/ robotics you're supposed to experiment and make useless stuff, but this seems like a professional project. I guess I'm not familiar with the whole world of robots-- maybe this stuff is normal and fine I'm thinking too much at 3 AM..

waterlesscloud 17y ago
The robot is picking up an object with a deformable geometry, analyzing that geometry, and then using that data to manipulate that geometry in a desired fashion. It does this with a series of objects of different sizes, shapes, and colorations. It was presumably not familiar with these particular objects ahead of time. There's a lot going on here, and it's valuable to have done it.