A Tale of Two Robots

[unixronin]

It was the best of races, it was the worst of races:  It turns out the reason the autonomous-motorcycle entry in the DARPA Grand Challenge crashed three feet from the starting line is because the actual entrants themselves are not permitted to do anything to start off their vehicles other than remotely sending them the "Start" command, the DARPA person who was actually trained on the autonomous motorcycle was unavailable that day, and the stand-in who was hurriedly trained the night before the race failed to activate the motorcycle's stability-control software.  "From this we learned that user interface is critical, even for an autonomous robot," said Anthony Levandowski of UC Berkeley.  "Had I put a light on the handlebars that indicated the status of the stability control software, we would have been fine."

Getting it all down on paper:  A CMU grad student, meanwhile, has developed an origami-making robot as his doctoral thesis.  The robot can currently make paper airplanes, pointed hats, cups, and a few other simple shapes.  "Balkcom and Mason said robotic origami potentially could become a benchmark for measuring progress in the field of robotic manipulation, much as chess is for artificial intelligence, robotic soccer is for robotic cooperation and the Grand Challenge desert race is for autonomous vehicle navigation."

Comments

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Funny, if I was building an autonomous robot out of a motorcycle, I'd put the stability control software in rc.local, but that's just me.

"A light", my ass.

-Ogre

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, actually, he makes a valid point. They had to be able to turn the stability control software off when moving the motorcycle by hand, otherwise it could -- and did -- injure someone in its attempts to stabilize itself while being moved. In this case, the DARPA helper failed to turn it back on again, and apparently didn't realize it.
Ideally, of course, the motorcycle would be able to detect when it's being manhandled and just take it easy. But that's probably an extremely difficult thing to discriminate.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

The robot motorcycle problem is worthy of a plot from "Oh My Goddess!" - I can just see Skuld looking baffled as Morisato explains to her that you sometimes need to install a more user-oriented system. Hmm, life imitates manga. (Except Skult would then have built in an AI system to run the bike. Soon, soon...)