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I have been fantasizing about a similar setup for some time, but an arachnid instead of a quadrupod. I imagined it to pick up trash in land with a lot of vegeta

I have been fantasizing about a similar setup for some time, but an arachnid instead of a quadrupod. I imagined it to pick up trash in land with a lot of vegetation. Never got around it because I am on my own personal project and this sounds like a massive amount of work for a single person. Congrats and good luck. Will bookmark it so I can get back to it when I am freer. Sounds like a very good starting point for this topic. One thing, why use a machine learning algorithm for path finding in the maze instead of just using an actual path finding algo? Did I miss something?

nicrusso7 6y ago
thank you very much! any feedback is welcome! Re the maze, I've got just the terrain so far - I'm working on the gym environment.. I was thinking to write 2 different versions of it, one in which the robot has a map of the maze and navigate it using a path finding algo (probably A*) and another version without any map (I'll probably need a lidar for this).
- ptsneves 6y ago
  Some time ago I tried to use rt-rrt[1]. It should be quite suited for your setup, or at least more than A* i think. Actually when I get back to your project I will try to implement it inside your framework. [1] https://github.com/ptsneves/rt-rrt https://github.com/ptsneves/rt-rrt
  - nicrusso7 6y ago
    Awesome! Any PR is welcome. In the meanwhile I’ll have a look at your rt-rrt implementation.
- konjin 6y ago
  Congratulations on your multi-millon dollar startup. Are you hiring?
samatman 6y ago
I've thought about a similar platform, but as an agricultural robot for smallholding. If you have a quarter acre, you can have a nice garden, and it's kind of labor intensive but hopefully enjoyable, and you can get some nice food out of it. With five to ten acres, food security is in reach, and some left over for market. But it's really rather a lot of work, and the tools farmers use to make that work easy are massively oversized for the job, and require you to lay out the land according to the logic of a much larger farm. A pig-sized arachnid robot, with a vision module and a few replaceable tools for 'mandibles', a replaceable lithium pack for an abdomen: that could bring the amount of work back down to a part-time job. This is a company, not a project. But backed with open-source software so that the machine learning and supplemental tools can be improved by users, I think it could be quite a successful one, and make the world more robust and anti-fragile.
- nicrusso7 6y ago
  This would require a very good image recognition software! Anyway yeah I do agree that agricultural robots are quite interesting and profitable at least in the near future.
  - ColanR 6y ago
    I would have thought that level of image recognition was already here, even close to being packaged up in Python packages. You think we're not there yet? With half decent radios, the brains of the bot could be stashed back at HQ, which would really improve the amount of computation available.
    - samatman 6y ago
      Brains are really not the limiting factor, and yeah, the raw materials for doing this kind of recognition are pretty mature. You'd want some kind of server in any case, but I bet the CV could feasibly be done onboard. The physical manipulation part would take some work for sure, and the robot itself would be fairly expensive to make, but it's all pretty achievable. You need it to do more than a BobCat while costing less. It's not "Uber for $sector" but it can be done.
rapjr9 6y ago
Arachnid robots would be ideal for household vacuum cleaners. Roomba's are useless if you have cables on the floor, lots of equipment and furniture, stairs that need vacuuming, roughly surfaced floors, or a variety of other conditions.

nicrusso7 6y ago

thank you very much! any feedback is welcome! Re the maze, I've got just the terrain so far - I'm working on the gym environment.. I was thinking to write 2 different versions of it, one in which the robot has a map of the maze and navigate it using a path finding algo (probably A*) and another version without any map (I'll probably need a lidar for this).

ptsneves 6y ago
Some time ago I tried to use rt-rrt[1]. It should be quite suited for your setup, or at least more than A* i think. Actually when I get back to your project I will try to implement it inside your framework. [1] https://github.com/ptsneves/rt-rrt https://github.com/ptsneves/rt-rrt
- nicrusso7 6y ago
  Awesome! Any PR is welcome. In the meanwhile I’ll have a look at your rt-rrt implementation.
konjin 6y ago
Congratulations on your multi-millon dollar startup. Are you hiring?

samatman 6y ago

I've thought about a similar platform, but as an agricultural robot for smallholding. If you have a quarter acre, you can have a nice garden, and it's kind of labor intensive but hopefully enjoyable, and you can get some nice food out of it. With five to ten acres, food security is in reach, and some left over for market. But it's really rather a lot of work, and the tools farmers use to make that work easy are massively oversized for the job, and require you to lay out the land according to the logic of a much larger farm. A pig-sized arachnid robot, with a vision module and a few replaceable tools for 'mandibles', a replaceable lithium pack for an abdomen: that could bring the amount of work back down to a part-time job. This is a company, not a project. But backed with open-source software so that the machine learning and supplemental tools can be improved by users, I think it could be quite a successful one, and make the world more robust and anti-fragile.

nicrusso7 6y ago
This would require a very good image recognition software! Anyway yeah I do agree that agricultural robots are quite interesting and profitable at least in the near future.
- ColanR 6y ago
  I would have thought that level of image recognition was already here, even close to being packaged up in Python packages. You think we're not there yet? With half decent radios, the brains of the bot could be stashed back at HQ, which would really improve the amount of computation available.
  - samatman 6y ago
    Brains are really not the limiting factor, and yeah, the raw materials for doing this kind of recognition are pretty mature. You'd want some kind of server in any case, but I bet the CV could feasibly be done onboard. The physical manipulation part would take some work for sure, and the robot itself would be fairly expensive to make, but it's all pretty achievable. You need it to do more than a BobCat while costing less. It's not "Uber for $sector" but it can be done.

rapjr9 6y ago

Arachnid robots would be ideal for household vacuum cleaners. Roomba's are useless if you have cables on the floor, lots of equipment and furniture, stairs that need vacuuming, roughly surfaced floors, or a variety of other conditions.