Posted on 02/25/2010 12:04:38 PM PST by RogerFGay
I'm not kidding. I think that's a very positive title.Senario, known to enthusiasts as the distributor of Pleo the baby dinosaur, is rolling out a new remote controlled robot with a price tag of about $10. This is interesting.
Think about DARPA's strategy for ubiquitous robotics. It needs a broad range of developments in the consumer market to drive further development and bring prices down. We now see a full spectrum of prices and capabilities emerging.
If you want the most advanced humanoid robot on the planet, you could go for a REEM-B with Brainstorm software. I expect the package would set you back more than a hundred thousand Euros. ...
(Excerpt) Read more at mensnewsdaily.com ...
REEM-B is way kewl !
Does DARPA really need to drive prices on simplistic creations that can hardly be called “robots”?
The DOD, DARPA’s main customer, doesn’t need cheap robots.
They want smaller, smarter robots and I don’t know if the toy or civvy tech market is going to drive either of those categories.
This is nothing more than a little bity plastic remote control toy in the shape of a robot with LED eyes. It’s not even capable of anything more than go forward and turn, just like any really cheap remote control car.
It doesn’t deserve the title “robotics”.
Does DARPA need cheap robots? Well, the military does and they haven’t made that a secret. What they’d like is a huge number of robots doing all kinds of things.
Focusing solely on specific military needs would result in all R&D being paid for by the government - not just for end products - but for everything in the supply chain. Without cross-overs into civilian use, you also don’t get the benefits of economics of scale.
For all that to work, you need a strong industry with a broad range of consumer products. If the civilian industry works, the military plans will too - at an affordable price.
All robots are just machines.
Bump for 9 year old son!
I see your point.
I was blinding myself by considering on the “tactical to practical” applications of large scale robots, vs the opposite with consumer products.
I believe they would, just like the PC market drove computers and applications. But you have to get the ball rolling to reach a critical mass, before the civilian market takes an interest.
I think if you could create a basic robot that had a lot of open interfaces so components and peripherals could be upgraded or changed out as necessary. I think it would need at a minimum the following:
And then it needs a set of applications to get the ball rolling. Some simple ones would be...
So that's over $20,000 of annual value excluding the "caregiver" duties, which of course would be harder to develop. So if you had a general purpose robot that could do some or most of these things, and it sold for $20,000 it would have a payback of just 1 year. And at that price there would probably be enough demand that you could mass produce it.
Of course, there’s the huge DARPA investment in miniature robotics as well, and the smaller surveillance stuff, and PacBot types ....
All military applications are not large.
No, I’m familiar with the pac bots and micro UAVs, but I didn’t see a reverse-engineered source (civy to mil) from the commercial tech center.
The civvie market can provide inexpensive and flexible control elements, with various comm systems and internal bus archetecture.
From there they can much more easily design stuff actually useful to them.
NASA took the first integrated calculator chip (back when Intel was a TI spinoff) and used it on Pioneer- it was cheaper to make a COTS part rad-hard then to have NASA start from silicon and build up. I think it was the Intel 4004, and was originally used for a handheld calculator. Then it controlled “robots” and lots of other things.
Who do you think will manufacture the stuff? -... (private industry)
Sure, but I didn’t count the development to arise from civilian technology applications. Materials and some concepts, yes, but I still think the true “robotic”/AI technologies to arise from military requirements and not kids toys. The robots I work with in manufacturing are, even at state of the art, very crude in terms of intelligence.
You left out:
7. Pleasureable activities: est. value $150,000 a year.
But if civilian applications drive the development, all the firmware will come from China, and if you use it in combat against the Chinese (or someone willing to pay the Chinese), the opposing commander just types in a command into his laptop and all your stuff stops working! ;-)
ROFLMAO. You know Laz, I read the post first, and then I looked to see if you were the one who sent it.
But yeah, That might require additional peripherals and/or skins. But there is definite value there.
Software from China? LOL!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.