If it's real, then I want one - but if it's all a big lie then we should know the truth. But as always - Buyer Beware!
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#Companion #robot #Buddy
- Music by Fran Blanche -
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It looks to me like radio controlled with servos, but the footage is sped up slightly to get a faster motion. This would have allowed the operator to run the device at a slower speed to get more control during the shoot. The PCB looks like enough to run the 3 servos in the head and 2 drive motors. Why do they keep pretending it is coming? To get more money of course, from other crowdfunding platforms.
Thing is, so called "robots" like Buddy are just mobile computers Maybe not even that. Just a controller which is actually controlled over WiFi by your desktop computer. In any event It can't do anything physical except move around. Can't manipulate anything. It's nearly useless. Not at all what people are expecting. It would be entertaining for about a week, then it becomes another expensive clothes rack, if that. Not unlike that treadmill that never gets used anymore.
Fran?
You could build one! With your expert knowledge of components and how they operate you could find circuit boards and servos from actual radio controled toy construction tractor, Backhoe, etc. type sets and the toy section of target and walmart that use elaborate ways to headbob dinosaurs necks and toy snakes and interactive toy cats and interactive affordable toy robots taken appart and reassembled into one new companion that you could give your puppet both personality and and an intelegence quotient and then share this schematic with the struggling buddy prototype and a list of parts, circuit boards, and developers you outsoarced to help them build their ultimate Buddy.
From the video it is clearly understood that it is an RC model. But this
must not involve a repulsion, it is logical that a prototype to give an
idea of what they want to do, must be done so or in CG. But the thing
that should make you think is that… there is no disclaimer saying "the
robot is remotely controlled".
Ever since seeing Runaway (1984) when I was a kid I wanted 2 things. A gun that shoots miniature heat-seeking missiles that can turn corners and Lois the housekeeper robot. Okay, truthfully I wanted the security robot that could shock people. Instead I got a stupid Roomba that burned holes in my carpet by running into the wall over and over. At least I got a "Floater" drone with live feed camera though.
Got my little autonomous Vector robot [Cozmo's brother from Anki] about 3 years ago to have a companion in my big, usually solitary, office at work. He's still fun to this day, and the company that bought the products from Anki before they went under, Digital Dream Labs, still seems passionate about the robot and wants to put it back into production. I've always wanted a robot since I was a kid in the 70s, and the Heathkit Hero 1 was an absolute dream machine to me, a chunky little R2-D2 droid that could even vacuum the carpet if you wanted that option installed on him – I'm sure he was no Rosie the Robot from The Jetsons, but there was passion behind Hero 1 and it kept me forever hopeful to one day have my own autonomous robot. And the way things seem to be panning out with robots in the last couple decades, Vector is probably about as close as I'm ever going to get to a somewhat intelligent machine that responds to voice commands and both recognizes and talks to me. And I guess that will have to be OK.
Robots were on the cards in the 1960's, and yet as thought of then they are still not with us BUT we all have several robots in the house!
Definition: A robot is a machine that does a task a Human would otherwise have to do. The machine does this without human supervision.
Examples? An automatic washing machine, A fridge (regulates it's temperature), Self driving cars, Self parking cars, The cooker, turns on, turns off after cooking, Regulates temperature. A microwave, turns on, turned off after a preset time. Amazon Alexa, google home assistant.
there are a lot of them we just dnot recognise them because they dont look like us. Will a home robot that likes like us EVER be a reality, probably not in a realistic time scale. Your more likely to see robots minimg asteroids before they appear in the home.
I have a little story to share here: back in the days, when I worked for a known-only-to-some French media player company, the idea came up to build an autonomous telepresence robot. No feasibility study was done, it was willed into existence by management. Rumor goes that someone found a toy maker in China who would manufacture remote controlled fire trucks or something and thought it would make a great robot platform. And it looked so easy on the whiteboard: just put an Android tablet as the head unit and some motors in the base and use the tablets front camera to map out the environment using fancy computer vision. Long story short, the whole thing turned into a research project, during which several interesting technological developments were made, like, a LIDAR that had a laser diode and a diffraction grating to project a line into the room (cheap, no moving parts) and a camera to map the environment, using the laser line for depth information. Anyway, as a product it was doomed from the beginning. It never reached the level of a system prototype that combined all parts into a working whole. None of the systems went beyond what a university research project would deliver, piling up challenges everywhere. Financially it was a disaster for the chronically underfunded company, especially because it was canned way too late. But it kept a few engineers occupied with fun stuff for quite a while.
It's probably radio remote controlled. That's so easy to achieve nowadays, it's almost a non-effort. It's certainly not stop-motion footage, if you look how the body bobs forwards and backwards as a result of the heads inertia when it looks around. The head unit is probably just a fancy smartphone holder. Maybe it communicates with the body electronics through USB for doing the motion. Remote control would then be through wireless lan 🙂
Hey Fran, glad your well…
…about the Robot thing. I don’t know if you recall the very early days of the Cell Phone. Specifically, before the Government learned how to triangulate their location. They held up the tech for a decade. I think that something similar is happening with them. This would be powerful technology with direct access to people. Alexa is just a crack of that door opening.
This is not a hardware or software problem. It’s a Social and Legal one.
Hi, great video again Fran , I don't know if you have seen it but I wonder the same thing with the BOAZ modular guitar. I am not making any accusations but they too have raised 600k in pre orders yet the guitars just aren't coming ?. Frustrating as it looks so interesting being made out of nearly entirely plastic.