On 06/01/07, Philip Goetz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I worked for a robotics company called Arctec in the early 1980s. We built a robot called the Gemini. They essentially solved the navigation problem - in an office-space world. You stuck one small reflector on both sides of every door, at intersections, and on its recharging station, and if the world consisted of hallways with doors leading off the hallways, it went where you told it to go, and went back to its docking station and recharged when it had to. This was using a 1MHz 65C02. The navigational code took 12K of RAM. It relied largely on having highly-accurate narrow-beam sonar sensors all around its body, and on the reflectors.
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 problem wasn't technological. It was that nobody had any use for
a robot. We never figured out what people would want the robot for. I think that's still the problem.
This is something which I've also considered. When you look at a dumb robot like a Roomba, the technology to build this fairly economically has existed for something like the last 25 years. So why didn't these devices appear much earlier? I think for a robot product to be successfull not only does the technology need to be there, but also the cultural attitude. 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. - Bob ----- 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
