From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Fri May 24 2002 - 11:51:28 MDT
I've seen a couple of articles this morning about a new robot being
demonstrated at the E3 video game convention, the ER1 from Evolution
Robotics, http://www.evolution.com. It looks pretty stupid, basically a
Pentium laptop on wheels with a webcam on top, but it supposedly includes
some first-rate image recognition and navigation software so that it can
actually find its way around, a first for a hobby robot. The kit is only
$499 but that does not include the laptop, which must be an 800 MHz PII,
so that would be pretty expensive if you didn't already have one.
The company is the latest from Bill Gross, whom I went to school with back
when his company GNP made stereo speakers. He went on to be famous and
successful with his educational computer game company and then IdeaLabs.
An article at http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,52757,00.html
talks about a foot-long mechanical arm and claims the robot can fetch
you a beer, but the Evolution web page doesn't show any arm and it seems
doubtful that it could perform such a complex function. I think this
is a mixture of hype and future hopes.
As it is the robot can mostly respond to voice commands, and also respond
to objects and images that it sees, either with voice or by sending email.
It could conceivably be a relatively inexpensive telepresence platform,
if the software on the laptop could be set up to display a remote
webcam image of a person, while the webcam on the robot sent images the
other way. I have visions of a bunch of these things trooping into a
conference room and climbing little ramps up to the table where they
join in a meeting with real people.
Hal
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