Banapana » Those Crazy Droids

Neutralizing the Truth!

Russell Warner — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 06:08:22 +0000

The Pentagon’s Unmanned Spokesdrone

Personally, though, I always thought it was more effective when the unmanned drone was made to look like an attractive woman. Or am I just thinking of Battlestar Galactica?

Dissection: Armatron

troped — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 03:53:59 +0000

Speaking of robots and toys that American consumers buy, I recently pulled out an old Armatron from the garage and thought I’d see if new batteries would get the old boy to activate. No luck, but that warranted further investigation, and what I found, I was really surprised by. As you can see from this photo, this is a pretty complex little device. And two things in particular really wowed me. One, was that as I was disassembling this guy I was keeping close track of what screws were coming out of what sleeves. It was only after a while that I realized that all the screws were of the same width and length. That might sound obvious, but I’ve taken apart an awful lot of things that didn’t have such nearly effecient designs. This one is tight. The casing was so well put together that even after more than a decade (and who knows how many years in dustry attics and garages) there was no dirt inside the gearboxes—the gears were all still lubricated!

Moreover, there’s only one motor! That also might not sound like such a big deal for a toy, but when you consider that this toy has six degrees of freedom (rotate left-right, up-down, left-right elbow, up-down writst, wrist rotate, pinch) then you really have to marvel at the fact that it is all gear driven and all powered by only one motor. If you take a look at the picture on the right, you can see that the motor is the little silver cylinder. That motor turns the whole green tumbler assembly, each section of which is in control of one of the degrees of freedom that I mentioned. The motor essentially never stops turning the whole time the machine is on; instead, the controls (two joysticks on the outside panel) simply release the different sections. That was a surprise to me—that really the controls aren’t “activating” anything, but rather releasing elements of the device.¹

Well, hopefully I can get a new motor at Radioshack; it would just be too cool to have it on my desk at school. Picture a cup of pencils, a cup of pens and a cup of candy. Person enters the room. “Excuse me, could I borrow a pencil.” Me, “Why, yes,” Whhrrrrrr whrrrr whhrrrr click whirrr whirrr (ten mintues later) Me, “There you go!” Person, (rolling eyes) “Thanks so much.” Why, people would never borrow writing instruments from me again!

To boot, it’s something that really makes me want to get out my leogs droid kit again! ↩

American Consumers Prefer Robots, Not Toys

troped — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 13:59:05 +0000

Via Cognews I found “Robot Consumers, Grow Up!” by Lance Ulanoff. His basic premise is that the more that robots look like real humans or animals, the more put off the American consumer is by it. But I couldn’t disagree more with this analysis, and there’s a very different way of looking at it. American consumers are some of the most risk-taking consumers in the world. A simple fact of the American economy is that we like new things—a great deal of our economic growth depends on this. However, we do demand of our products that they prove actually useful (or wildly entertaining). $350 toys, regardless of their complexity (or how much they look like dinosaurs) don’t interest us as much as a robot that can actually vacuum the floor. From my personal point of view, an AIBO gets less bang for buck compared to a wind-up toy. And I’m not underestimating it’s complexity, as Ulanoff would argue—that the Aibo is complex is a given. But complexity for the sake of what? What does it do that a virtually free dog from the animal shelter doesn’t?

Who cares what it looks like as long as it can do the job? American consumers aren’t put off by humanoid robots; the problem with all humanoid robots is that they are little more than very expensive toys at this point. The humanoid form-factor is really only useful if you’re smart enough to use it (which doesn’t necessarily imply human-level intelligence–just a lot). Until such a time, useful robots will remain tanks and frisbees and all the better because they can actually do labor that way (instead of falling down the stairs).

Open Source, Meet Open Robot

admin — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 16:06:28 +0000

Some students at George Mason University have put together a wiki that will document the construction of a small open source robot (costing roughly $800). I don’t have much to add to this other than it’s cool and that I’ve been looking to upgrade from Mindstorms for a little while now.