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/?member_id=231415&user_secret=fabd7936
