[info] [agi] News bit: Carnegie Mellon unveils Internet-controlled robots anyone can build

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Benjamin Goertzel <ben at goertzel.org> -----

From: Benjamin Goertzel <ben at goertzel.org>
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 08:26:19 -0400
To: agi at v2.listbox.com
Subject: Re: [agi] News bit: Carnegie Mellon unveils Internet-controlled
 robots anyone can build
Reply-To: agi at v2.listbox.com


   On 4/26/07, Bob Mottram <[1]fuzzgun at gmail.com> 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
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References

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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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