On 1/6/07, Bob Mottram <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Reflectors have been used on AGVs for quite some time. However, even using reflectors the robot has no real idea of what its environment looks like. Most of the time it's flying blind, guessing its way between reflectors, like a moth navigating by the light of the moon. In my opinion to make real progress the machine needs to be able to see the three dimensional structure of its environment at least as well as you or I can. Only then can it make more intelligent decisions about what to do.
The robot navigated successfully around a home or office, avoiding obstacles, at walking speed. What more do you need? I think it performed so much better than the robots developed in academia partly because we didn't have enough processing power to use a camera, so we weren't sucked into that black hole (at the time) of trying to process vision.
Even now robot startup companies such as White Box Robotics seem to have little idea of what their machines might actually be used for. The application of last resort is always "security", but this is a very poor use for a robot in my opinion. Security is better and more economically done with a dissembodied intelligence using fixed cameras, a la 2001.
We had a customer who wanted us to attach a gun to the robot. Probably not a programmer. :P ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
