This is funny. Peter Jenkins, who I mentioned ran over a Roomba robotic vacuum while riding a Segway scooter, has upped the ante by half-playfully, half-seriously asking on his blog:
[In a Roomba vs. Segway encounter] "...There is a Yin-Yang thing going on here - the Segway (Yang, mobile, tall, hunter/adventurer) v. the Roomba (Yin, domestic, close to the ground, gatherer), so maybe it's more than just a classical battlebot scenario, but rather part of a broader analogy portending future events? What is the required ratio of Roombas to Segways to produce an evolutionary stable strategy?"
Now I don't know much about that, but...to the Second Life laboratory! If anyone with SL scripting skills wants to set up a Segway(s) vs. Roomba(s) encounter I'd love to feature it at half-time of an SL Future Salon. Maybe Peter can even virtually reprise his performance by ceremonially (and über-geekily) rolling over the first Roomba!
Cory Ondrejka, SL's VP of Product Development and the one who originally reported the Roomway Segba mash-up, made a Roomba-like bot in SL at last year's Accelerating Change conference. From his blog post:
"...It was interesting to actually observe [a Roomba] up close. In many ways, it behaves almost exactly the way simple creatures in SL do and probably uses many of the same algorithms... Helen [Greiner, co-founder of iRobot] also talked about the next steps for iRobot, including small, autonomous, networked robots used to explore spaces. This was pretty cool, so during the next talk I popped into SL via WiFi and built a small room, bought some appliances for it, and then coded up some small explorer bots to move around in it. Bits are so much easier than atoms! Not an accurate simulation, but amusing, and a screen shot ended up in my slide deck."
When I covered last year's Humanoids robotics conference, the benefits of prototyping behavioral robotics in a 3D virtual space were apparent. Several of the presenters hadn't physically built the robots they talked about, but instead programmed simulations of how the robots would (or should) behave in the world. I saw this employed for problems on the "this robot needs to successfully navigate a room full of obstacles" side as well as the "we need the way this robot looks, speaks, and emotes to engage to people" side (in-part helping navigate the Uncanny Valley where highly but not perfectly humanoid creations freak people out!).
Back-stepping, Cory gave a great talk at Accelerating Change called "Living the Dream: Business, Community and Innovation at the Dawn of Digital Worlds" which can be downloaded here at IT Conversations (if you haven't seen it, ITC is an amazing resource). And a Boston Globe article outs Helen Greiner as a Second Life user. She says it's ''a whole artificial world; a really neat game they let you program... The programming paradigm is somewhat similar to the behaviors on the robots."
Interesting to see her and other leading robotics people getting interested in this kind of design process. A lot of promise here down the road as virtual physics makes further in-roads on real world physics (physical physics? :-).
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