Serge the robot (from Caprica)
HollyMinkowski
Posts: 1,398
I'm a fan of the SyFy channel show "Caprica" and there is a household robot butler named Serge.
The design looks nice to me and I was wondering if anyone here knew of a similar robot that
uses a single ball on the bottom for mobility?? ...has anyone actually made a bot like this?
I can see how it would be easy to drive the ball to produce motion but I wonder about how to
spin the bot left and right if the floor was dusty? Seems like there would be a problem with the
big ball just spinning while the robot stood still. I can see ways to overcome a dusty floor while
moving the bot but spinning it around while it remains in exactly the same spot is more difficult.
I wonder if an internal gyro in the bot could be quickly sped up or braked to produce rotation
of the robot...it might also make balancing the bot easier.
The design looks nice to me and I was wondering if anyone here knew of a similar robot that
uses a single ball on the bottom for mobility?? ...has anyone actually made a bot like this?
I can see how it would be easy to drive the ball to produce motion but I wonder about how to
spin the bot left and right if the floor was dusty? Seems like there would be a problem with the
big ball just spinning while the robot stood still. I can see ways to overcome a dusty floor while
moving the bot but spinning it around while it remains in exactly the same spot is more difficult.
I wonder if an internal gyro in the bot could be quickly sped up or braked to produce rotation
of the robot...it might also make balancing the bot easier.
Comments
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"A complex design is the sign of an inferior designer."
I download them and watch them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8jxGsg3p0Y
Nice to hear from you, Holly! I still have diapers for you to change,·stop by next time you're in L.A.!
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·"If you build it, they will come."
Looks like Hanno has to upgrade the dancebot!
Jim
I thought we wouldn't see you for months, but misses must have cut you some slack
Jim
I love the series, for reasons that might be obvious to anyone familiar with my non-Parallax web presence. It smartly advances certain ideas that are close to my heart, while also doing a nice portrayal of near-future tech and being well-acted and projecting a believable international (interglobal?) community with amusing substitutions of pagan religious observances and social mores for the ones we take for granted.
Yes, the boy is the young William Adama that 50yrs later commands the Galactica.
It relates to BSG because this series shows how the cylons came to be.
It all started when the brilliant Zoey Graystone wrote the code to create avatars
that were sentient beings in a virtual world... after Zoey dies in a bombing her father transferred the Zoey avatar
code and data to the very powerful cpu in his military robot prototype....creating the first Cylon
@erco
I'm a long way from CA now but I'd gladly do a few diaper changes for you just to get to play with
those two little angels
@localroger
You summed the show up nicely there!
Those are pretty much the same reasons I like it so much..
Glad you are back! I've never seen the show, but now y'all have me fired up to see it.
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Whit+
"We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." - Walt Disney
This is the first example of the one-ball-bot I remember:
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/08/060809154145.htm
And I completely agree regarding the show, very cool.
- dave
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Chris Savage
Parallax Engineering
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I think it would be very easy to go down stairs using a ball-bot.
Going up stairs would require the ball to be able to retract and
pop back down with enough force to jump the bot up to the next step.
It is possible but I wonder how noisy it might be...
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·"If you build it, they will come."
Northwestern University robotics engineer Malcolm McIver was a consultant on the upcoming movie Tron, and worked with writers on Battlestar Galactica as well as Caprica to make the cylons plausible - if not possible (yet). He tells Script Ph.D.:
One of the themes of my research is understanding the ways in which intelligence is not just all about what's above your shoulders. Nervous systems evolved with the bodies they control-the interaction is extremely sophisticated, and stubbornly resists our attempts to understand it through basic science research or emulation in robotics . . . One of the things we've learned about the cleverness that resides outside the cranium is that things like the spinal cord are incredibly sophisticated "brains" operating sometimes without much input from upstairs. Through some old experiments that are better not gone into, scientists showed that animals can walk with little brain beyond the parts that regulate circulation and breathing and their spinal cord. This is because the spinal cord can do most of what we need for basic locomotion without any input. The point is that control of the body is distributed-it doesn't just live in the brain. The lesson hasn't been lost on robotics folks; for example, Rodney Brooks popularized an approach called "subsumption architecture" based on this idea. So – back to Caprica: For episode 2, "Rebirth," the show needed some explanation for why the metacognitive processor was only working in one robot. The real reason, as we know, is that only one had Zoe in it; but the roboticists were being pressed by Daniel Graystone as to why it wasn't working in others. The idea that I gave them, which they used, was that it was because this particular metacognitive processor had distributed its control to peripheral subunits. Because of this, it had become tied to one particular robot. It's an idea straight out of contemporary neuroscience and efforts to emulate this in robotics.
Total in depth interview is at www.scriptphd.com/?p=1748
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"A complex design is the sign of an inferior designer."
Post Edited (iDave) : 3/17/2010 12:23:09 AM GMT
Most quadrupedal animals are born with a walking reflex that is entirely adequate to get them mobile within hours of birth. Humans have this reflex too, and any pediatrician can test for it, but it's not adequate to get us mobile and in fact we have to lose it before we can learn to walk for real. While humans still do a lot of remote preprocessing part of the genius of our species is that we have moved so much of what other species do to the reprogrammable tabula rasa of the cortex, where we can acquire new moves and reflexes via practice that evolution didn't think to equip us with. Other animals can't do that; the racehorse that didn't inherit the instinct for the perfect gallop cannot be helped, but humans can learn to dance.
Still, there is much preprocessing and remote unpacking; most of the information that hits our eyes never even reaches V1 in the brain, and whole groups of muscles react in harmony in response to relatively simple signals from above. But if you look at the Cylons of Caprica there's no reason for them to be deploying so much remote processing, and that very line in Rebirth struck me as being very wrong for the portrayed level of technology. Of course we can probably tell they will figure out how to copy Zoey at some point, since there is a sequel 50 years in the future where that sort of thing has obviously happened, but I just don't realistically see it being as much of a problem as it's been portrayed so far.
http://twitter.com/SergeGraystone
According to the tvtropers Serge knew Zoe was in the Cylon robot all along (though that twit has fallen off the page now). One of the TVTropers thinks it might be Serge and neither of the V-world gals who will become the protocylon.
Holy thank you I thought the father was Adama it makes more sense to me now knowing the son will grow up to be him, I just watched a few more episodes its pretty cool but I wish the plot would move faster
Nice robotic assistants for Tony Stark budgets!
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·"If you build it, they will come."
Till the next time.....my evil foe......till the next time!
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“How much of human life is lost in waiting.” Ralph Waldo Emerson"
Of course, those fairly expensive robotic assistants could be replaced by some cheap castering mover's dollies...
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·"If you build it, they will come."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PENSEenxRQo
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Check out the Propeller Wiki·and contribute if you can.
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·"If you build it, they will come."