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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>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.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>In ten years this sport might replace NASCAR in popularity. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Even more of a hoot would be robot motorcycle racing.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>spike<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></body></html>