Sony Aibo Hacks Increase Functionality 134
Dinglenuts writes "Engadget posted a how-to article on increasing your Aibo's functionality using third party hacks. Given the increasing availability of networked home goods, I'm very interested to see what uses the Slashdot community can conceive for a household controlled through voice commands issued to a robot dog."
Overcoming the narrow scope of original designs (Score:5, Interesting)
Accelerando and the future of Aibo hacking (Score:3, Interesting)
It will be interesting to see how complex these customized Aibo become in the next 10-20 years.
Real world robot cat (Score:3, Interesting)
More [bbc.co.uk] links [e-health-insider.com] which I didn't bother to read...
not just for fun and games (Score:2, Interesting)
Reading the article might induce the ideea that AIBO is nothing but a toy for bored geeks. That's not entirely true, I'm thinking that proper software could turn the thing in an aid for blind children.
Let's just hope engadget doesn't get sued [wired.com] first, like that guy from http://aibohack.com/ [aibohack.com]
A useful agricultural robot (Score:3, Interesting)
NASA, of all people, claims to have developed a robot that can do fruit and berry picking. They claim that it's cheaper than sending than sending Mexicans into space, regardless of how little the wages are.
Personally, I've done stoop farm labor, picking shade tobacco, and it sucks. It's the true robot work.
But building a robot to do this is no simple matter. It's a serious programming challenge involving highly reliable vision processing, very intricate robotic arm positioning, and hygienic food handling in adverse conditions. And in order to be financially viable, these very sophisticated robots will have to be able to be manufactured cheaper than our neighbors can manufacture babies, and they have a 100,000,000 unit head start. We won't be able to just buy the robots either from the Japanese. By then, they won't be taking our near-worthless money and will demand payment in prime agricultural farmland. Where they will use their more advanced latest-model robots to grow their own food. Japan, you may recall, has 100,000,000 people living in a country the size of California where 80% of the land is too mountainous to use for farming or city space.
Now, having made myself seem to be a complete asshole from a politically-correct perspective, allow me to point out that the use of robots to replace unskilled labor is an issue that many (if not all) electronics and software engineers will be dealing with in the future. Farm laborers will hate us and will destroy the field robots at every opportunity. We will be accused of causing the childern of the unemployed workers to starve. And they will be right. The children of the unemployed farm workers will starve as a result of the farm robots. But, the robot designers point out, 'Why should an unemployed farm worker who must sneak into the US to work at sub-minimum wages have ten kids?' "We don't have ten kids. Hell, we can't even get the plain suburban white girls to go out with us. And we have real jobs!"
Ugly. A real mess. Unavoidable. Tragic. It's like saying that engineers are responsible for the continuation of African-American slavery from 1800 to 1865 because they invented the cotton gin. Without the cotton gin there wouldn't have been huge cotton plantations in the southern states of the USA requiring huge numbers of slaves. Had not the cotton gin been invented, the white southerners would have had an oversupply of slaves and would have shipped millions of them back to Africa.
Will we get the same blame a hundred years from now for causing millions of Mexicans to starve to death? Or will we be able to say that all those deaths were the result of a disfunctional culture obsessed with fucking themselves into massive over population just so that they would appear 'macho' by having absurd numbers of children?
Time will tell.
Re:Aibo DRM? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're interested in the low level processing, which allows direct processing of the camera images, networking support, real-time control of joints, etc., then of course I'm going to recommend the software framework I'm currently working on: Tekkotsu [tekkotsu.org]. However, there are number of other options available as well. (see my prior post [slashdot.org])
Anyway, we'd always like to have more developers -- help show Sony there are advantages to opening their source code!
(* or at least now they are, originally they didn't like the idea so much, but they seem to have gotten over it somewhat -- hardware is still tightly locked down, but the software interface is pretty available)