An interesting article, with videos, about a skiing robot. Pretty cool stuff. As the title says, it’s not terribly useful, but it is fun to watch.
As someone who took an undergrad course in AI and robot programming, this certainly impressed the hell out of me. Just the code to get it to recognize the race gate flags must have been a real bear to write.
I have seen this before. I think on discovery chanel. Pretty neet.
Yeah, I wish I were smart enough to study AI. It’s actually pretty interesting after studying a little neuroscience. I think it’s underappreciated just how analog the brain is. Also, the level of complexity in the hardware… This robot has one processor devoted to calculating visual info. Your brain has one “processor” devoted just to finding edges in an image, another to find motion etc. If you had all of these processors to grab out of a box, some of these problems would be a lot easier, I bet.
@BrianN,
Yeah, trying to digitize the analog so computers can deal with the information seems like a real bear. Yet, I haven’t heard too much about analog computers.
@Pitt
I don’t know much about it, I imagine it would be pretty hard to come up with. But I did see a talk by a guy who had taken all of the properties of the multiple layers of the visual cortex and had a series of chips fabricated with the same properties, with a CCD chip on top of the whole thing, so you could “see” what the different layers (of a cat brain) sees. Pretty cool.