Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Make: Believe // The Fenn Robot”.
My name is Ian Danforth and I’m a software engineer and robot assist, I’m the founder of embodied AI and the creator of the Fen. I’Ve written a story about a group of creatures, alien creatures who live on another planet, that we’ve made contact with and at the fend, commute an entire story. Introducing these wonderful furry, alien creatures and at Maker Faire you’ll be able to see the robotic embodiment. I’Ve taken. A lot of readily available components and put them together in a novel way, and they will all be dressed up in an outer shell. That will be the character of the Fen. Most of the logic is actually going to be performed using the front facing camera.
On the Nexus 4 and all of the computation that is going to be done in the cloud which is pretty different from most how robots do it? It’S also got a number of other sensors in the phone. It’S got, accelerometer, gyroscope, etc and it’ll be using interesting. Waypoints, you know finding people in the crowd finding their faces going up to them, asking them for the ball in the storyline. It’S called a jury. Fruit they’ll, throw the ball it’ll, find the ball in its little playpen, go, get it and bring it back to them. It’S sort of a initial demonstration of the possibilities of the platform and I’m gon na have to do a little bit of work to integrate the two other missing pieces that you don’t see here.
One is the touch sensitive skin and, having LEDs run down the back of this creature and together, they’ll, give you a great experience where you can actually pet this guy and have lights flow along with your hand, and have him react like a real animal should where, If you press him lightly, he likes that if you press him hard, you know he runs away and he doesn’t like you anymore, and I think that’s going to be key to the experience of treating this not as a robot, not as a toy but as a Pet as a companion, somebody that you can bring into your life and your kids can love and play with this is the prototype of our skin, our four robot a project I worked on with Hanna printer Wilson out of MIT, and it’s an e textile multi-touch sensor. It stretches and bends and moves along with the robot arm, and this is something that a lot of robots are missing because it’s hard to deal with joints and it’s hard to get the kind of interesting, proprioceptive information that we get from our skin. You know where is my arm. Part of that comes from the stretch of our skin and robots haven’t had that. I think that many more people should learn how to sew, because it’s it’s great to be able to integrate soft stretchy fabric with the normal, hard rigidity of Robotics, and I think that’s one thing that a lot of roboticists have missed out on is that they’re good With circuit diagrams – and you know, soldering, but they’re – not good with a sewing machine, it’s massively opened a world of possibilities that I didn’t have before. This is an exploration of a multi-touch sensor, based along the same lines where you can get. You know the the darker greens are where I’m pressing pretty hard. You know I can touch it.
One point I can touch at multiple points and it’s really really simple. It’S it’s. You know wire, wrap fabric, blue tape, an Arduino Uno and that’s it and you get this wonderful, incredibly cheap, multi-touch pad. So when I started out at Numenta I was writing code and eventually I ended up transitioning to project management and during that transition I wanted to remind all the engineers everyday that you know you’re building Big Data and artificial intelligence in the cloud.
Please, please don’t build Skynet, you know I want them to interact with kids so that you know kids can teach them how to be nice and kind from the start. You know I don’t want people in the military to be the only people who are trying to teach robots how to do things. I want kids to teach them how to fetch. I want kids to teach them how to sit in your lap, and you know parents to teach their kids to treat robots well.
And I think if you start with a good touching story – and you know the a childlike attitude you’re much less likely to build something. Dangerous and much more likely to build something that is beneficial for Humanity. You .