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Dog Has No Bite Sony Robot Runs Low
Dog Has No Bite Silicon Valley has a great article about Sony's Aibo robotic dog, which sums up some of my thoughts about the toy nicely -- Sony's New Robotic Dog Doesn't Have Enough Bite for the Buck. It looks at the many pitfalls of the robot, including it's price and relative stupidity. That said, it has some benefits, most of which apply only to hobby roboticists or researchers. In related news, National Geographic has a feature on the robocup football championship; Soccer Robots Compete for 6th Annual RoboCup. There's a nice photo gallery, and a few quotes from the people involved who are bragging about the feats of AI and the difficulty of the problem! | Alex J. Champandard 935 posts. Tuesday 18 June, 13:47 Reply
Visual avoidance The bit about AIBO bumping into a chair leg was amusing. Actually I think there are very few mobile robots which can avoid such collisions. Most robots use active methods for obstacle detection such as infrared, ultrasonic or laser where the obstacle has to be directly in the line of sight of the sensor to be detected, so thin objects such as chair legs are often missed. Probably the most reliable way to avoid such collisions would be to have a pair of cameras on the robot and do a simple disparity calculation. Subtracting one image from another gives a disparity image. Pass the result through a threshold and then calculate a rough distance and horizontal offset which can be used to steer the robot away. - Bob | motters 136 posts. Tuesday 18 June, 16:38 Reply