At the moment I'm thinking of robotics in a Moravecian manner, where the main purpose is to perform very utilitarian labour saving chores, but as some of the projects on the TeRK site suggest there may be a whole variety of unconventional uses for robots which few people have ever tried simply because of the high technical barrier to be overcome.
I have thought about making a robotic artist in the distant past. Some of the first robots which I remember seeing in the 1980s used the LOGO language to produce sketches using different coloured pens. You could maybe do something similar to that, with a mouse-like body and a few differently coloured pens mounted on servos (there is plenty of scope on the Qwerk to add multiple servos). Alternatively you could build something more like a manipulator arm, and attach pens as if they were fingers on separate servos. And then there is the Jackson Pollock robot, which would behave more chaotically. So you have a bucket on a string. The bucket contains paints which can be released by servos. The movement of the bucket is controlled indirectly by two motors pushing or pulling the string, producing an erratic pendulum motion of the bucket. When your masterpiece is complete you can call yourself an abstract expressionist and sell the robots works to the Tate gallery for a million dollars with the title "Expressions of post-human hubris". On 26/04/07, Benjamin Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 4/26/07, Bob Mottram <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Well you've correctly anticipated the next step. I'm adding a > manipulator arm, which is only a little shorter than an adult human arm, so > that the robot will be capable of doing a few useful jobs. The intention > here is to use it for things like sweeping, mopping or dusting. Hmm... looking at the photo of your bot, and imagining it here in my livingroom (where I work, and my 10 year old daughter often hangs out and plays, draws or reads), I immediately had a somewhat different idea.... Sweeping, mopping and dusting are not very interesting to me. (Anyone who has visited my house can confirm this! ;-) However, I think it would be rather interesting to see a variant of GROK1 that could draw pictures. I'm not sure what the right medium would be: -- a whiteboard, perhaps? but erasing would be hard for the robot -- a tablet PC screen is a bad idea because the clumsy robot might break it, and it's costly -- a flip-pad of paper might work best, if a simple physical mechanism allowing the robot to flip to a new page were devised I guess either a whiteboard or a flip-pad would work fine initially, even if the erasing/turning-the-page problem isn't immediately solvable. A bot that could draw physical pictures of what it sees, on a pad of paper or whiteboard with a marker, would be quite fun. It could also draw collaboratively with people --- it would be looking at the pad of paper, seeing what the person drew, and then making a visual response. My daughter would certainly get a big kick out of this ;-) ... and I like the way it mixes up perception, action, social interaction and symbolic representation. I am envisioning a special manipulator arm that has slots for plugging in a few magic markers of different colors. So the bot's "hand" would be a set of a few markers, basically. The manipulator would need to be flexible enough to draw pictures. The "hand" would contain a mechanism so that at any given time, it could extend one marker and retract the other ones a bit. To change colors, it would just make a different choice as to which magic marker to extend. This bot would be fun for people to interact with, so it would get taught a lot more than a bot that sweeps, mops and dusts... Just a thought... -- Ben G ------------------------------ 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/?&;
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