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Wanted: Home for Adventurous Robots 75

Posted by timothy from the that's-a-lot-of-land dept.
mr.crutch writes "According to an article by the Associated Press, Carnegie Mellon University is actively seeking at least 600 acres of abandoned land in Western Pennsylvania on which to test robots developed by the National Robotics Engineering Consortium. Land speculators may want to contact real estate agents in the Pittsburgh area to cash in!"
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Wanted: Home for Adventurous Robots

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  • i guess conventions are too dangerous and judges are too fragile :-(

    QED

  • 600 acres? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Traxton1 ( 154182 )
    I've got a spare bedroom. Just send me 2 or 3 would you?

  • Insert Terminator reference here...

  • Battlebots anyone? (Score:4, Funny)

    by NeMon'ess ( 160583 ) <flinxmid&yahoo,com> on Monday August 05, 2002 @07:10PM (#4015159) Homepage Journal
    Just one day a year, could Battlebots fans please use those 600 acres? I'd really like to see how far Nightmare's blade sends shrapnel.
    • This immediately made me think of the interview Dr. Richard Wallace [slashdot.org] and his comment:

      Q: How many Carnegie Mellon Ph.D.s does it take to screw in a light bulb?
      A: Two. One to change the bulb, and one to pull the chair out from under him.

      ...so I guess that should make things more interesting?

    • Oh right.

      600 acres is roughly 1 square mile (see for yourself [megaconverter.com]). A typical battlebot has enough juice for a 5 minute round, including moving the opponent and use of weapons.

      Ignoring the fact that you would have trouble seeing your battlebot at one mile, and assuming it doesn't consume any energy for the weapons, it would have to travel at a minimum of 6 mph just to reach the opponent (assuming the opponent is moving towards you in a straight line at the same speed). That spends all of its battery power on traveling.

      What do you get? People racing battlebots towards each other.
      • So start the bots 50 feet apart like in the ring. The operators stand at the perimeter looking into binoculars set on tripods. Its not like the perimeter will have lexan. Every person wears body armor like in paintball and if they want a lexan sheild they bring it themselves. The superheavyweights can easily reach 20 and perhaps 30mph, by the way.
      • Way to take a joke dude. Lighten up, and just keep thinking... robots are way cool. I want one.
    • Screw those puny battlebots.

      I want to see a schoolbus powered by twin GE turbojet engines and a giant rotating blade go against a garbage truck with big ass pinchers.

      I think I would actually pay to see it on PPV.

      --toq
      • This thought reminds me of an excellent episode of Junkyard Wars I once saw.

        The challenge: To build battling R/C cars. No, not the little foot-long cars you race down at the track.

        Take a real junked automobile, rip out the driver's seat, hook up some remote-controlled servos to the wheel and the pedals, and for the finishing touch, add some weapons for ramming and slamming. Take 'em out onto a wide stretch of sand and smash 'em against each other for points.

        Man, I love that show....
  • No disassemble number five!
  • 600 seems like a lot of land to me. what type of bots do they need to test on such an expanse? I understand if they wanted to build a lot of buildings and differnet environs - but seriously... I think that regardless of the reasons why they tell you they want 600 acres - they are probably hoping to have the 600 acres donated to them so they can just use it to expand their campus, and that not all of that land would be dedicated to testing bots. But they are using the robot testing argument so as to convince some donor that is interested in robots that they are doing a "good thing" for robotics research...

    all educational institutions do this. they ask for a large X for project A when they really want to use X for proj ABCDEFG or even just A and Z.

    • Well, as a student at CMU, I can tell you that it'd be great to see the campus expanded. However, given that we're about 5 minutes from downtown Pittsburgh and the land they're talking about is out west, that would be one long ass commute every day. Maybe we can take those crazy BDD airships?
      • i wasnt inferring that it was right next door so to speak - the point is that any land that is donated to a school - regardless of how undesirable it may sound now is quite valuable. and even though this would not be physically attached to the campus - it still is a lot of land.

        yes - 600 acres sounds bigger than it is - but think of it in real world terms - not metric conversions: you live in all likelyhood in a fraction of an acre if you live in an apartment. The world trade centers twin towers had a footprint of one acre each. they were large buildings - length x width (height excluded) so if you think of 300 or 600 twoer footprints all right next to eachother... thats a lot of space.

        I was just pointing out that 600 acres of land to test and RC car (robot mobility) seems excessive.

    • I doubt they're looking for land right in Pittsburgh/near campus...in the article they mention strip mines/quarries...they'd have a hard time getting 600 acres in Pittsburgh, but like I say in another post, go 30 miles out and they've got plenty of space for testing grounds. Especially if they want rough terrain...there are a few abandoned coal mines about and my grandparents live near a strip mining region.
    • It doesn't seem like a lot of land when you consider that it's less than one square mile.

      I wish we could finally adopt the metric system. Big numbers and odd units really impress people. If everyone used the same system, you wouldn't need to know what a quart, stone or a furlong is.

      • Re:600? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by aardvarkjoe ( 156801 )
        Well, the problem of people not realizing that numbers get real big when you square them doesn't go away by making everything multiples of 10. People will still be surprised to find out how big a cubic meter is, and that a square kilometer is a million square meters. No matter how obvious it seems, for some reason people aren't too good at making those connections.
        • Right. But by only using metric units, you would know that meters are much smaller than kilometers. If the area was given in millimeters, you'd think twice before being impressed.

          As is, I had to use a converter to find out what 600 acres was in square miles and kilometers. (I'm fairly proficient in both.)

          Using metric units would prevent such problems. I insist on metric because that's what most of the world uses. Just look at your cars - all metric. Plus having everything a multiple of 10 makes things a lot easier than converting 11/16" into decimals.
    • 600 seems like a lot of land to me. what type of bots do they need to test on such an expanse?

      Rampaging killbots?

    • Block Quote - "I think that regardless of the reasons why they tell you they want 600 acres - they are probably hoping to have the 600 acres donated to them so they can just use it to expand their campus. . ."

      Well see I would buy into this if CMU wasn't located within the City of Pittsburgh. :-)
    • 600 seems like a lot of land to me. what type of bots do they need to test on such an expanse?
      The big black delta robots, of course!

      They are clearly out to (ahem) immanentize the eschaton. The authorities are helpless; our only hope is for hordes of Battlebot operators to bring their robots and fight the deltas to a standstill. Botniks, this is your hour!

      (Sadly, the guy who approved the script for "Mortal Kombat: The Movie" is probably stroking his chin right now, going "hmm...")
    • not really bots. Mellon is into robotic machines. Things that like to big REALLY BIG HOLES for example. Farm equipment, military equipment.. So it wants 600 acres of land it can tear to shreds and nobody says UNCLE!

      actually.. my own personal opinion is they just need a bigger place to party [cmu.edu]
    • "What type of bots do they need to test on such an expanse?"

      These [darpa.mil] types [darpa.mil] of robots [cmu.edu].


      These are robots which need to be able to autonomously traverse 50-100 miles of unknown terrain, perform operations at their destinations, and return. Testing them on the 3 acre front lawn [cmu.edu] doesn't quite give enough opportunity to prove out systems like that.

  • I'd like to see a place where hobyists could send their robots on a survival trip. Just plug in a wireless card (or wathever) and follow your robot via the internet. Now that would be cool/nerdisch.
  • Go CMU. On the upside, they've got a lot better chance of getting their 600 acres than many other urban universities. There's tons of land out in Western PA, if you get 30 miles or so out of Pittsburgh (which I don't think would be too inconvenient). However, the suburbs are growing very quickly...especially Cranberry Township, which is one of the top 5 regions in the United States for growth in the past couple of years, from what I've heard.
  • Bender!
  • If they need a place to test these things why not send them the Afghanastan or Iraq? That way they have rough terrain, and they get to kill bad guys too.
  • can you imagine being some hunter or hiker who misses the "verboten! cyborg proving grounds, blah blah etc..." signs and sees one of those things in the woods? just as the military secrecy around area 51 has become a sort of touchstone for all sorts of modern myths about ufos, can you imagine what kind of folklore will develop amongst accidental visitors and curious but uninformed local teenagers about this "area T2" (i guess you could call it that)? ;-P

    2012, two teenagers creeping through the underbrush in western pennsylvania, near dusk:

    teen1: dude! we gotta get home.. they dug old mines here too deep and let loose shape-shifting metal men from deep in the crust

    teen2: no way man, i heard a colony of ants developed sentience around here and are building six-legged attack drones in their image to mount an assault on humans!

    teen3, running by real fast: i'm gonna shit in my pants dudes! this cold dead looking thing just told me her name was Grace and wanted to register for the next pennsylvania geocaching association dinner!

    5 years after that, they'll make a "blair witch" knockoff in which 3 lost teenagers are presumed to be killed and eaten by long-lost golem men brought to life in decaying blast furnaces and steel mill ruins by 19th century satanists ;-P
  • Why would someone simply abandon 600 acres of land in western Pennsylvania? Perhaps because it has been strip mined?

    The robots should have fun in that terrain.
  • No one's yet commented on some of the issues that have gotta be there, which are cool I think. What if you lose one? Big robots might be easy to spot yeah, but what about smaller ones. Having that much space give you the opportunity to test some cool stuff like actual navigation and location problems in real scale.

    Talk about potenitally noisy neighbors though... "Sorry our 500kg robot tore down your fence and let the animals out. It was only our of sight for a few minutes."

    I bet they'll still check for abandoned mine shafts and wells just as carefully as anyone else.

  • ...the area previously used for underground nuclear weapon testing?
  • Maybe my company would like to sell them their "wasteland" of dead computers that they refuse to hand over to geeks like me...
  • hmmmm, I got at least 700 acres of various terrains upon the death of a certian relitive who was rather fond of me....... Don't like that Durnk much either...

  • This article is better (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cfulmer ( 3166 ) on Monday August 05, 2002 @09:32PM (#4015717) Journal
    To counteract some of the (apparently uninformed) negative comments I've seen, check out this article [post-gazette.com] on the same subject from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
  • Just make sure you land is actually *in* Pennsylvania and will remain there... those crazy New Englanders keep changing the boundaries....
  • Dad: Clean up these robots for testing before dinner.
    Son: But I was going to the tashi station to pick up some power converters!
  • 600 acres is roughly one square mile, or about a half-square mile per site. That's not an enormous amount of land for a robotics testing facility, especially for groups such as CMU and NREC. If you want a good amount of varied terrain, you're asking for a lot of space, particularly when dealing with larger/faster robots. Considering they're looking for "junk" land, I think it's a great use of otherwise abandoned space ...
  • White Sands Missile Range has such a test area now, used for testing mobile robots. Typically this involves mine disposal and such, but occasionally weapons systems are tested.

    The link [army.mil] is supposed to be here, but the server is down.

  • Screw robots, what about the saga of lobsterboy? Can you believe this is a respected CS school? My parents called, they want their $120,000 back.

    Intrigue [thetartan.org]

    Drunken Misadventure [thetartan.org]

    Vow of silence broken [thepittsburghchannel.com]

    a new beginning [post-gazette.com]
  • It's all fun and games until a rampaging robot destroys half your city. . .

  • Wanted: home for amorous robots

    ... for a new Fox show

  • if they're willing to travel a couple of hours, maybe the Rigas family or Adelphia would be willing to part with some of their holdings. There's ton's of land for sale around Coudersport.

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