|
Posted by Mike Young on October 25, 2005, 4:10 pm
> Stagnation of technology. Hard to believe, isn't it? In the end, what can
> the average person do that he couldn't do 5 years ago, and how exciting is
> it? It's not the technology that stagnated, but certainly the level of
> technology easily grasped did. DIP PICs and RC servos are accessible.
> Multi-GHz dsp is not. Maybe you don't see it, but the barriers to entry
> there are insurmountable to all but very few. And who has time or
> incentive to use it to reinvent, what?, boring old battlebots? I think I'd
> summarize this is lack of relevance and access for the common denominator.
Also, I want to add that Randy is right to focus on the sensors. Solving the
machine vision problem and making it accessible would open the floodgates
wide in ways unimaginable, not just by us tinkerers, but in every segment of
industry. In the meantime, our 'bots are deaf, dumb, and blind. Deaf for
essentially the same reasons as blind. Voice recognition software on PCs are
gadgets rather than essentials. 'Bots, with very few exceptions use sound
only as a crude replacement for the missing eyes. I heard of very few that
respond to environment sounds in a way that resembles intelligence. Dumb,
simply because it has very little to say. It means both mute, and the other
meaning of dumb.
Machine vision and environment sound recognition are the problems to solve
now. This is breaking new ground, not just for the hobbyist, but in industry
in general. It is more of a software and conceptual problem than it is of
motion or device control, which are what most people think when they hear
'robotics'. So, you see, the forefront is not here; it's in the software and
science groups. Our newsgroup traffic is down because simply spinning around
and flashing a few lights is old hat, not very challenging.
Last, I think it likely the vision part is solvable with today's processors,
and might already have been solved. It would be of such strategic
importance, though, that we don't have access to it. What if DGC was not so
much to harvest our thoughts and ideas, but really to gauge the civilian
state of the art in environment recognition? It would be just like those
sneaky bastards... ;-P
| 
Yahoo! 
Google 
Windows Live 
del.icio.us 
digg 
Netscape 
XML site map
> the average person do that he couldn't do 5 years ago, and how exciting is
> it? It's not the technology that stagnated, but certainly the level of
> technology easily grasped did. DIP PICs and RC servos are accessible.
> Multi-GHz dsp is not. Maybe you don't see it, but the barriers to entry
> there are insurmountable to all but very few. And who has time or
> incentive to use it to reinvent, what?, boring old battlebots? I think I'd
> summarize this is lack of relevance and access for the common denominator.