WIth the last day of February upon us, I have been doing a little bit of Spring Cleaning and seeing what other stuff has been out there in the past. In coming days, I will be bringing out some of the past content in robotic telepresence / remote presence to see where we are and where we are going.
If you know of some great historical data, please help us fill out the History of Remote Presence section of the Future of Remote Presence.
On to our links:
Want to hear a secret?
- Korea’s Yujin Robot Jumps Into Educational Telepresence – (Plastic Pals) Once again, our friends find another great system that is going to be a contender in the RPS space. Yulin Robots get a jump into the space with a slight modification to their CAFERO robot calling it the ROBOSEM. And we will see about getting more details on this system in the near. (h/t: Plastic Pals)
- While NASA’s Robonaut 2 Is In Orbit, Its Hype Has Escape Velocity – (Singularity Hub) – Aaron seems to be a little down on the over-hype that is driving awareness of the Robonaut that is up in space with the Discovery today. In his words:
As I mentioned in the beginning, the serious damage from all this humanoid in space hype, however, is that it will obscure the real benefits that this ISS mission for Robonaut 2 could achieve. NASA has us expecting robots and humans acting together in some sort of Star Wars style mission. Robonaut 2 is not R2D2. You know what Robonaut 2 will be doing while at the ISS?
[After you watch this video, you discover – yes] that’s right: tedious, tedious testing of maneuvers. That’s pretty much all Robonaut 2 is slated to do in space. NASA has to learn how the robot reacts to the microgravity, the radiation, and the electromagnetic interference. Other robots, like Dextre, have had a long history of malfunctioning in the dangerous environment. It can take years or troubleshooting to get a space robot fully functional. But read this quote from NASA:“R2 will be confined to operations in the station’s Destiny laboratory. However, future enhancements and modifications may allow it to move more freely around the station’s interior or outside the complex.”
— Description of International Space Station mission on Robonaut website (2011)That first sentence is all we really need. Yet they can’t seem to avoid the hype-machine. They always have to push it.