[ExI] robotic controllers

[Ryan Rawson]

noisebridge has a kinect and has been messing around with it for a
while.  It delivers multiple video streams including 'depth' streams,
pretty nifty junk.

2011/9/30 spike <spike66 at att.net>:
> Oh man, I am so not hip, oy.  I went by Fry’s Electronics, saw some kids
> playing with a video game using a thing they call the Kinect 3D.  I started
> asking questions.  It occurred to me that something like that would be just
> the ticket for a robot controller: it is cheap enough and has an instruction
> set that can be used directly by developers.  Coool!  This is just the thing
> controls engineers like.  I don’t know how long these things have been
> around and I failed to notice.  The salesman said they were around last
> Christmas when he was selling jillions of them.
>
>
>
> It all got me to thinking: we have car racing, which helped develop a lot of
> interesting automotive technologies, but it hasn’t for a long time.  The
> cars are far too specialized now, and they are all the same.  They don’t
> appear to have changed much in recent memory.  But we can imagine a cool new
> sport: robot racing on a standard road circuit.  Since the engineering is
> all controls stuff, we wouldn’t even really need high performance cars:
> ordinary Detroits will do just fine, older ones even, cheap, readily
> available.  Then we use a Kinect 3D sensor, video game Wii accelerometers
> for feedback, run the software on an ordinary laptop computer, three sets of
> actuator/resolvers for the steering wheel, gas and brake and that’s all we
> need to get started, ja?  Then all the real engineering magic is in
> software, and hell even I would pay money to see a bunch of robots race.
>
>
>
> In ten years this sport might replace NASCAR in popularity.
>
>
>
> Even more of a hoot would be robot motorcycle racing.
>
>
>
> spike
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