5 ms·
I can think of a few projects that would be useful and fun, i.e. laundry-sorting bot, sandwich-making-bot etc., but they'd all be expensive and difficult to do.
by thdd 13y ago
I can think of a few projects that would be useful and fun, i.e. laundry-sorting bot, sandwich-making-bot etc., but they'd all be expensive and difficult to do.
A cheap, robust robot hand/arm would go a long way towards making this kind of robot-hacking accessible, but the bigger obstacle is that the generic computer vision building blocks that you'd need don't really exist yet (OpenCV is a good start)
The problem is that many tasks that seem simple (when you take millions of years of visual system evolution for granted), for example recognizing a sock in a pile of laundry, turn out to be pretty difficult.
- jfoster 13y agoSome of the theoretical problems do seem to be quite difficult, but the great thing about implementation is that as long as it works "well enough," no one minds if you cheat. For example, recognizing a sock in a pile is difficult, but what if the robotic arm just tries to pick it up anyway? From there it can weigh it as well as better seeing the size & shape of it in order to determine whether it is a sock. The difficult theoretical problem suddenly gets replaced with acceptable behaviour for the laundry-sorting application.
- sophacles 13y agoI like your outlook :) On top of this, if a robot is doing the work it doesn't have to be the most efficient. Do it in stages... sort by weight or rough shape. Then a second pass does the "is this a shirt or pants" computation. Then sort those piles. Finally come back to "pairing socks". Or don't. It's already saved me a bunch of effort! Let someone else figure out what to do with a pre-sorted pile and I'll just add the firmware or another stage robot. It feels very "hacker ethic" to me!
- mikepurvis 13y agoYou might be surprised at the software components which do actually exist: http://moveit.ros.org/ http://moveit.ros.org/ Check out the videos on that page. There are a lot of obstacles to inexpensive robotic manipulation; the main ones are power-weight ratio and power-cost ratio of the actuators.