Meet the newest Anybots robot today at Stanford | Hacker News Reader

Meet the newest Anybots robot today at Stanford

sam.bluwiki.com

28 pointsSam_Odio10 comments

Very interesting, could it go into a mine? I mean could the miners be safely above ground while the bots are in the actual mine. Or how about in deep water? I know there's a lot of very dangerous and important work for divers around oil platforms. Could that bot be use there?

Alternatively, what kind of autonomous functionality does it have?

A friend of mine broke is foot and we were both at party with him hoping around on crutches. He couldn't stand with his crutches and hold his drink at the same time. So my friends and I took turns being his butlers. We joked around that if we were stinking rich we could get a robot to follow my friend around at a short distance and hold his drink on a tray at just the right height the whole night.

This idea however probably doesn't have a very large market.

I also had the idea of robotic luggage or even a baby carriage that follows a person at a short distance... this should be easier to implement, I think.

That's a great idea. Airports could buy them and then people would only rent them while they are at the airport.

Not the current product iteration. I talked to Trevor today and he said that they've been doing research on bipeds etc for years but decided for the market they were pursuing (essentially mobile video conferencing), a Segway-like solution is perfectly feasible (ignoring stairs, but I'd imagine they could do something with RF transmitters hooked up to elevators to ignore this problem).

The current product weighs about 40lbs, and thus is probably sturdy enough to hold maybe 10lbs of stuff?

Just 40lbs, wow! That's some great engineering, I'm guessing keeping the wight down was part of the design process.

>Alternatively, what kind of autonomous functionality does it have?

I don't believe Monty has any autonomy. The closest autonomous robot I know of at Stanford is Andrew Ng's STAIR project (STanford AI Robot): http://stair.stanford.edu/ Right now they are working on some gripping/haptics stuff, like opening doors.

If you are going to be at Stanford today, you can also attend Jensen Huang's talk at 4:30 PM. He is the cofounder and CEO of NVIDIA.

http://etl.stanford.edu/

Aargh!! this is what i miss being stuck in Bangalore!! :-( Have fun anyone lucky enough to attend!

edit: grammar fix

Monty, what a name for a robot, especially when it was programmed in Python.

How easy is it to tip over?

This is pretty close to the terminator movie robots

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