8 ms·
I keep trying to think of practical implications for this technology, but every time I do, I just end up daydreaming about robot circuses.
by jawns 14y ago
I keep trying to think of practical implications for this technology, but every time I do, I just end up daydreaming about robot circuses.
- trafficlight 14y agoThat's practical enough for me.
- gojomo 14y agoI'd like to see an aerial battle-bots event. Imagine a giant transparent cube or orb 'stadium', with entry points for opposing fleets. There might be capture-the-flag or last-man-standing victory conditions, and a variety of units, perhaps including dirigibles.
- stcredzero 14y ago> There might be capture-the-flag How about "Transport the flag?" Or how about a bunch of flags? The other team is allowed to try and disrupt your transportation as well.
- baddox 14y agoCapture the flag generally implies "transport the flag."
- stcredzero 14y agoI was going for something like the economy in StarCraft. You have a stream of poles shot into the arena from catapults, and scoring is based on how many get transported back to each team's goal. (Minus the exponential increase, though.)
- saraid216 14y agoI can't read this and not think Quidditch-minus-Snitch.
- kenny_r 14y agoQuadditch! Man, forget the Robocup (http://www.robocup.org/ http://www.robocup.org/), I would watch the hell out of a Quadditch tournament.
- stcredzero 14y agoYou could use a little copter as the snitch.
- saraid216 14y agoIn the eternal words of HPMOR!Harry, "And then whichever Seeker gets lucky swoops in and grabs the Snitch and makes everyone else's work moot. It's like someone took a real game and grafted on this pointless extra position so that you could be the Most Important Player without needing to really get involved or learn the rest of it. Who was the first Seeker, the King's idiot son who wanted to play Quidditch but couldn't understand the rules?"
- saraid216 14y agoOn the other hand, "keeping your eyes moving in a pattern" sounds like a thing that would be interesting for computer vision.
- stcredzero 14y agoI entirely agree that the seeker less variant is a more interesting participant sport. The seeker variant will probably be requested since it is canon, at least at first.
- alwaysdoit 14y agoI want them to throw some sort a water-balloon like device at each other and have them try to gently catch it. Except this balloon explodes with fire instead of water if it can't catch it softly.
- joelthelion 14y agoOr "build the biggest tower"?
- gojomo 14y agoBuild and defend!
- devindotcom 14y agoSomething that popped into my head is a drone tossing a grenade through a window. The military would go nuts over this.
- samstave 14y agoIt's sad that research like this is first thought to be most of value killing people.
- Wingman4l7 14y agoThey are going nuts over this. Just look at DARPA drone research, all the manufacturing contracts, the increased battlefield use, the call for more pilots to be trained...
- kunle 14y agoThey are already doing this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2281403/U-S-Air-Force-developing-terrifying-swarms-tiny-unmanned-drones-hover-crawl-kill-targets.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2281403/U-S-Air-Forc...
- kruken 14y agoLots of scary things are possible as the hardware gets smaller/lighter/stronger and the control algorithms get more sophisticated. Grenade lobbing is quite pedestrian compared to "precision targeting" in the video here: http://bit.ly/W6DnuO http://bit.ly/W6DnuO
- DGrutt 14y agoWaiter, another beer please.
- cadalac 14y agoPlease tilt head upward and open mouth.
- theorique 14y agoI heard that you can weaponize unmanned aerial vehicles ...
- rcfox 14y agoBalancing an inverted pendulum is one of the classic "hard" problems in control theory. (At least, in undergrad.) Not only has he solved that on a flying platform, but he's going to the next levels. Tossing sticks around between flying robots isn't inherently useful, but it means they have a foundation for further, more complex work.
- hogu 14y agowell you can do a single inverted pendulum pretty easily with a PID controller, it's the double inverted pendulum that is hard. But anything on a quadrocopter is really hard.
- rcfox 14y agoOh, you're right. I was thinking of the double inverted pendulum.
- bri3d 14y agoA free-flying small quadcopter is incredibly difficult as on-board sensors generally consist of noisy, drift-prone MEMS gyros and accelerometers, small and interference-sensitive magnetometers, bad civilian GPS, and barometers that are prone to environmental fluctuation. In addition, a free-flying quadcopter requires either complete autonomy or an RF link with some range or reliability, which generally requires a good amount of power. But these aren't free-flying quadcopters; the researchers used a very high-end motion capture rig and a PC in close proximity, making everything a lot less difficult - with motion capture, positional accuracy is quite easy and sensor noise is easy to correct for, and with enough money someone else has already solved the latency issues in motion-capture for you. I certainly agree this video is impressive but I also believe lab-only motion capture-based demos skew the hobbyist and public vision of what small quadcopters can do.
- bigiain 14y agoDid you see the show from Cannes last year? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cseTX_rW3uM&t=50 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cseTX_rW3uM&t=50 I don't know how much of that was motion-capture, it seems like a quite difficult environment to have done that...
- Jplenbrook 14y agohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNPJMk2fgJU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNPJMk2fgJU Aiming bullets, not poles.
- huherto 14y agolol. I can only come up with gaming applications. flying robots that build stuff(jenga?), air battles. I recently got a vacuum roomba and I am very entertained just on by watching it work. But I am a geek, probably not everybody is like that.
- egypturnash 14y agoMy first thought was "I want to see these juggle three poles". Nothing wrong with robot circuses.
- pseut 14y agoConstruction comes to mind immediately, but yeah, I'm a sucker for those videos.
- lazyjones 14y agoYou could catch someone falling off a building or airplane with a (suitably large and fast) quadrocopter, I suppose.
- primitur 14y agoBuilding emergency shelters as quickly as possible? Repairing wind-blown greenhouses in remote places as quickly as possible? Building a water-pipe as quickly as possible? Elevator-to-the-stars building mechanic?