On 4/26/07, Bob Mottram <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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'm thinking about it from an AGI perspective, in terms of what sorts of simple to build robots might be most useful for helping us move toward powerful AGI cognition... 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.
I like the idea of different fingers having different magic markers on the tips of them ;-) 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".
Brilliant!!! ';=) ----- 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/?member_id=231415&user_secret=fabd7936
