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.
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.