tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8526498499129692237.post3830412879995068795..comments2024-03-22T05:17:53.112-04:00Comments on Big Bad Bald Bastard: Secret Science Club Zoom Lecture: ShapeBig Bad Bald Bastardhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01983025559556548658noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8526498499129692237.post-2429350349233636782021-06-18T21:15:27.686-04:002021-06-18T21:15:27.686-04:00As to "a robot can't fold a shirt".....As to "a robot can't fold a shirt"...for about 10 years (ending 5 years ago) I, a pure and innocent topologist by trade, had an active and fruitful collaboration with a younger colleague in our small, mixed Math/Computer Science department, whose background was in theoretical robotics, specifically, in motion planning (she is now applying that to protein folding). We even had NSF support for a while, and so we (sometimes one or the other, sometimes both, and sometimes even some of our [undergraduate] students) got to go to a lot of theoretical robotics conferences of various sizes. One of the smaller, but completely free because local, was NEMS, the New England Manipulation Symposium. It was there that I learned about the Japanese shirt-folding algorithm, which is (or was) used by human workers in the garment trade. The people who demonstrated it (and also showed video of it being done in a factory) did it by hand, but were quite optimistic that it could be implemented robotically. I don't know if it ever has been, though. <br /><br />The field has been known for a <i>bit</i> of exaggeration from time to time. At my second conference, Robotics: Science and Systems 2006, in Philadelphia, one keynote speaker from Japan announced that the new Japanese industrial policy, with support from all the major corporations except SONY, had as one goal to replace 80% of elder care with robots within 10 years. On the other hand, at the same conference people were playing with the first quad-copter drones. On the other other hand, over the years I kept running into Sebastian Thrun planning to release fleets of autonomous vehicles Any Day Now. And I heard a <i>lot</i> about various robotic system designed to work in Hostile Environments: not Title IX stuff, but high pressure (or vacuum), high radiation, and so on. The Japanese, of course, were all over the development of robots to work in nuclear power plants. Everyone was impressed!<br /><br />My last NEMS meeting was held at the I-Robot complex north of Boston. (Sighted in the parking lot, a bumper sticker to the effect of "In event of Rapture, this car wins the DARPA challenge.") This was a year or two after the Fukushima meltdown. I got into a conversation with one of our hosts, who had at the time been I-Robot's Pacific area manager or something. He had helped divert a lot of their stuff to Japan quickly, after it turned out that the local robots...just didn't work as advertised. Oops.Lee Rudolphnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8526498499129692237.post-65620495621257144152021-06-17T21:31:46.108-04:002021-06-17T21:31:46.108-04:00Oh my gosh, this looks brilliant.
But I must conf...Oh my gosh, this looks brilliant.<br /><br />But I must confess, I'm really here to wish you a HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!<br /><br />XOXOMaggiellenoreply@blogger.com