Business, Entertainment - Written Friday, August 7, 2009 by Steve Guengerich - 2 Comments

Robot mass collaboration: 3 quick updates

Three quick updates to my post about “Robot mass collaboration” from last Wednesday:

First, I got some extra inspiration by attending the National Instruments annual users’ conference last week in Austin. Here are a couple of photos of Isadora, a robot that works very similarly to the CopyCat that I wrote about, this time built by a student team. The left-hand photo shows the small version of the bot, whose manual movements are captured via the NI software shown on the screen and then communicated to the larger robot in the right-hand photo, which automatically duplicates the movements.

Second, also in last week’s post, I mentioned my colleague Alan Majer and his “GoodRobot” project. If you like to help him with a little market research regarding robots, please take a look at his wiki page and add your thoughts. Just thinking through your responses to the questions helps to get you thinking about the possibilities.

Third, I have a grass roots appeal: if you have any interest in this subject, plan to attend South-by-Southwest (SXSW) next March, or just want to help us out, please go to the panel picker beginning Monday, August 17 and cast a vote for “Controlling Robots Through the Web.”