DPRG mailing list archives: DPRG: Wheel Chair Dreamin

Wed Feb 19 12:58:24 CST 1997

Was pondering the wheelchair robot, when I got to thinking about
what it should have.  I like to see it have at least one arm, and
at least a video camera on it, a compass, and speech, and a radio
link.

Maybe this WC (hey how about WC Fields?... Naw, it'd become a lush
robot.) could roll up to an object, see it with it's robotic vision,
and grab it with it's robotic arm.  I suppose that's quite a task,
but wouldn't that be cool?  (Doesn't this sound like stuff the HERO
robot wanted to do?)

It seems that a cheap (say $99) video capture card could get the video
in and convert it to a gif or jpeg.  Some other software could read
in those gifs (or jpegs) and do some sort of analysis on it.  The
video capture board my dad let me borrow has such a program that can
be downloaded from the internet that does that but was geared for
a web image server.  I figure a robot could use a similar program for
image input to an image analysis program.

Some of these things seem to need Windoze instead of Linux. :-(
Perish the thought.  ;-)

It'd be nice to have a radio link to it so that it could be controlled
remotely, or even possibly allow it to send back images (the link
may be too slow for that).  Maybe the video could be sent back via a
video transmitter or something like that.  

We could hook it to Steve's server for internet control?... 
Steve would never go for that I'm sure.  But wouldn't it be cool to have
control over the internet, and it could relay back the images over
the web?  Grab stuff with the arm over the internet and see it do it?
Dreams are free, right?

Speech would be nice for showy stuff.

A vacuum and lawn mower attachments?  

....or Telsa Theft deterrant devices? <wicked grin>

Just some thoughts.  Anyone have the fortune and time it would take
to build this ultimate bot?  It's fun to dream anyway.

BTW, why don't wheel chairs for parapalegics already have a robotic
arm?  Wouldn't that be cool for them?  It could let them touch buttons
on the elevator and pick up stuff, etc.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Brown                jbrown at spdmail.spd.dsccc.com or jbrown at why.net
                         http://users.why.net/jbrown  
                         http://www.dprg.org (Next meeting Mar 22nd)

Work:  972-519-2868      My employer won't claim these opinions.    
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