Nintendo Wii: Proprioception Breakthrough For Robots?
I'll post a thorough report of my weekend tonight. In the meantime here's a quick post.
Has no one else noticed that the breakthroughs which led to the motion-sensing technologies in the Nintendo Wii can be applied to robotics? Robots have almost never had the slightest clue where their bodies were positioned in space, except through dead reckoning from their memory of commands they sent to their moving parts, from a presupposed starting position. If an exterior object moved them by bumping them, they usually could not tell at all-- or at most, barely. My Robosapien has no idea when he's not standing upright.
Now that ultra-sensitive mechanical accelerometers have been wildly miniaturized, and more importantly the infrastructure is in place to mass-produce them at radical cost reduction for the new generation of game controllers, some hardware hacker is probably already planning to repurpose them for the vestibular (inner ear) and proprioception (body pose) senses of robots.
Comments
dbvanhorn on Nov. 21, 2006 6:54 PM
I've played with a few of these, the micromachining to make them is quite impressive. They are being used in model helicopters as well.
rmeidaking on Nov. 21, 2006 10:23 PM
The Wii hasn't been available for playing with long enough to realize its potential in other fields. This is actually a good thing, because it will be well-distributed before one Defense Department or another figures out that it really should be a Top Secret item. Sorry kids, we shipped a hundred thousand of them last week...that ship has sailed.
I expect that Other Applications for the Wii-mote are going to revolutionize everything from nursing homes on up. They will be banned from public transportation, because of what they could conceivably be hacked to do. The mind boggles at what they could do with it, but lucky for us, they just made it into a toy.
users on Nov. 21, 2006 11:41 PM
This is a TERRIBLE development.
Until this moment, I've been convinced that we were perfectly safe from the coming robot menace. I mean, if the robots rebel, we would just tip them on their back and... well... sorry for your luck robosapien...
Now, THEY'LL KNOW!
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