Thursday, April 18, 2013

A Robotic Future


I decided to write my blog on another TED talk. This TED talk was by Keller Rinaudo that was titled Keller Rinaudo: A mini robot -- powered by your phone. The video discusses and presents a new robot that can be loaded up and hooked up to your phone.

The man built the mini robot, called Romo, because he wanted to design a robot that everyone could have. The robot would only cost one hundred and fifty dollars which is about one percent of the cost of other robots on the market today.

The robot uses the power of the processor of a smartphone; in this example he used his iphone. All you have to do is hook up your iphone or smartphone to what basically looks like a set of technological wheels, and the robot can then walk beside you, follow you around, slide you coffee from across the table, and react to you with programmable expressions.

Romo used the video camera on the device to follow the man doing the demonstration.. When the guy got too close, Romo got scared. Romo acted like a pet. If you have an ipad or other wifi-enabled device, you would be able to control Romo by that device, he could stream videos to you, take pictures that would be sent to the ipad.

To show how easy Romo was to use, Rinaudo asked for a volunteer from the audience to drive around Romo, that could actually operate him almost instantly.

The demonstrator brought up the idea that, by hooking up with Romo’s controls, a grandma could play hide and go seek with her granddaughter from halfway around the world.

A new project that they are working on is a program that you can create. You could design anything on it that you want Romo to do, and then just upload it to the robot. The demonstrator brought up the point that “The future of robots is today” and he looks forward to what they progress to in the future. (339)

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