LOL, I'm feeling a bit proud of my work.

It's something for power electronics, regarding control systems, and from day one a week ago when I starting thinking about it and fleshing it out, I saw the applicability for electronic boost control.

 

Sweet! Congrats.

 

Nice! Congrats dude, I hope it works out.

 

Heh, thanks. I file for a lot of patents at work and only a few are filed with the USPTO and are granted.

Now I will start thinking about a practical implementation for boost control.

 

What is your day job?

 

I want whtaever algorithm is controlling these to control every PWM device in my car.

 

ok that is the most awesome thing I will see today. I can go home now.

 

Nano?

 

Did anybody else get a creepy Space Invaders / Galaga vibe at pretty much everything shown from 0:40 onwards?

That technology could actually be used to build a real-world implementation of Galaga. All you need is an airsoft gun and some means of detecting when an individual unit in the swarm has been hit.

Actually, programming the devices to function as a logical centipede would make for a pretty cool game of Centipede as well.

Or Pac Man. Where they're the ghosts and you're Pac Man. In a cornfield maze.

Actually, forget Pac Man. Those things are perfect stand-ins for the ghosts in Gauntlet!

One could produce such terrifyingly fun things with this technology.

 

They're starting with ping pong:




My day job = power and analog electronics design.

Power electronics: e.g. switching power supplies and motor drives

If I didn't get into power electronics I'd have gone into robotic control systems (which I did for a wee bit), such as the above quadcopters lol.

 

Blooper Reel!




Also how do you know if your patent is complete or just filed? or is there no distinction?

Also, the red lights in the still frame are infrared tracking. So be safe in knowing that the quadrotors can't organize like that without external sensory perception.

 

Yet

 

Come on, we've all seen this movie/read this book. The robots hide the fact that they've gained sentience/mobility/speech/free will until it's [almost] too late for the humans to do anything about it.

 

If someone gets the bright idea of connecting them to Skyn... I mean Google, we will get this:




I file it within my employer, then weeks or months later they may or may not decide to file it with the USPTO. Then a year or so later they decide to grant it (or not).

I checked online and I have >9 filed with the USPTO since 1998. Most of them were granted (the exceptions being those still in the process).

 

I was trying to find something more meaningful or clever to say but ended up with "very cool, Jason."

I'll try to make a witty e-card image later...

 

Well, add that to the list of things we no longer need humans for.

Actually, what is it about ping pong that fascinates the AI crowd? The folks at MIT were teaching a PDP-6 how to catch, and later hit, a ping-pong ball back in '66. And it worked!





Ah, yes. It's fortunate that no technology exists which allows large outdoor spaces to be remotely imaged, and said data shared in realtime with autonomous agents distributed across a wide area.Ah, yes. That would be the aforementioned technology.

It is, in all honesty, kind of scary to think about the relatively near-future possibilities of conjoining a realtime database of pretty much everything in the entire world (eg: google) with an army of semi-autonomous robots (eg: the Air National Guard's 174th MQ9 Fighter Wing, aka the "All Robot Attack Squadron"). Granted, folks have been fretting about this for decades, it just seems like we're nearing the point at which real-world technology reaches parity with decades of apocalyptic sci-fi.

 

A ping pong ball has zero chance of damaging any hardware, is fairly difficult to "just hack something" to work due to characteristics of the ball, and offers quite a few substantial challenges to work with. There's not -that- much of a difference between, say, a baseball and a ping pong ball speaking from a software perspective, but...

Did I mention it (a ping pong ball) has zero chance of damaging hardware?

 

True.

Though humorously, those present at the time report that the robot arm nearly killed Minsky on one occasion when his head wandered into its field of view and was mistaken for a ping-pong ball, which the robot promptly whacked with the paddle. (Some sources claim that the TV light reflecting off of his bald head looked like a ball to the robot.)

As much as I'm glad that Minsky didn't die (it would have been a serious blow to computing research in general), I'm morbidly curious to know, if he had been bludgeoned to death by the robot, what sort of hysterical news reporting would have followed it.

"Cyborg runs amok, murders MIT professor!"

(Journalism geeks will recognize the use of the Linotype font in its appropriate context here.)

 

I can hear the mantra of the quadrotor army:

THE WORLD IS MY FIDUCIAL

 

I, for one, welcome our new quadrotor overlords.