Robots: Army vs Tabley

Oh deary me yes, check this out.

Now that, my little furry friends, is the future.

It’s like one of these on steroids

On acid.

There’s this mega proliferation of flat-bed, cartesian type robots.. this is the way all the reprap energy seems to be going. There are loads of them. Everything from gardening robots

To open-source laser-cutters, to egg-painters.

The advantage of the cartesian-approach is that you can get fairly good precision for fairly simple maths. This brings the cost of the engineering down. The advantage of arm-type machines is that they can make things bigger than themselves. And that you can have more than one of them working together. And that they take up less space. And you can get them to give you (fairly bad) hand-jobs, and stir your tea, and play ping-pong with you and so on and so on.

I think the key to this is sending feedback to the arm-motors… so the machine can recalibrate its position 1000 times a second. There have been a whole rash of balancing robots recently… segway progeny (in fact I think someone has actually made one out of lego) so I think it’s doable. I also think that the sensors could (should?) probably exist outside the robot itself – a bit like the recent bunch of precision quadracopters

So the maths is harder… but maths is a software problem, and we can do software.