111–120 of 132 posts
I used to work in perception for autonomous aerial vehicles and horizontal wires were the hardest common object to avoid. Traditional stereo won't help you localize them -- wires are thin so even mere detection can be hard, and one portion of a wire looks much like another so feature matching fails resulting in bad or no depth estimates -- and LIDAR sacrifices resolution for weight and power consumption (which both h…
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> And the whiskers don't have to be all floppy like a wet noodle. I myself am thinking that something rigid or semi-rigid might be good. I don't think you're right about this. The concept of the whiskers is to notice when you've collided with something. Real whiskers aren't rigid because colliding with something when you're rigid means snapping. (Ever stub your toe?) Think of the rigidity of the whiskers as being tra…
I don't think you read my entire comment, or perhaps you're very unfamiliar with the operation of a PS3's analog control. (The whisker can be both rigid and also flexibly-attached. These are not mutually-exclusive constructs.)
You walk in one direction, then turn around and start walking in a different direction, but as you turn the sensor slams into something.
Does it fail to take damage because the yarn is flexible?
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I don't think you read my entire comment, or perhaps you're very unfamiliar with the operation of a PS3's analog control. (The whisker can be both rigid and also flexibly-attached. These are not mutually-exclusive constructs.)
Here, suppose you've got a rigid sensor attached to your hand by a string of yarn. You walk in one direction, then turn around and start walking in a different direction, but as you turn the sensor slams into something. Does it fail to take damage because the yarn is flexible?
Suppose I've got an assembly with a chopstick attached to a gimbal with some minor centering springs and sensors (potentiometers) inside. The chopstick has many degrees of free angular movement provided by this gimbal and overall assembly.
I gently bounce ("slam"?) that chopstick off of a thing, and this results in the feedback loop that provides positioning control to provide immediate instruction to back off in the opposite direction of the apparent impact.
Does the chopstick take damage? Does the gimbal take damage? Does the greater assembly take damage?
Why, or why not?
(I feel like we're speaking two different languages here. Have you ever looked at how a PS3 analog stick works, or have you not? It's not new tech. It wasn't even new when it was new, and it's very nearly 20 years old now in PS3 form.)
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Cables don't move often. Why not simply have a map of all of them? Google sell maps of things like this from street view data.
Any one particular cable might not move often, but if a telco owns N bucket trucks it's a safe bet that about N cables move every workday. Telcos are notoriously secretive about the location of their fiber. They even got most state legislatures to exempt it from state-level FOIA laws.
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Here, suppose you've got a rigid sensor attached to your hand by a string of yarn. You walk in one direction, then turn around and start walking in a different direction, but as you turn the sensor slams into something. Does it fail to take damage because the yarn is flexible?
Huh? Suppose I've got an assembly with a chopstick attached to a gimbal with some minor centering springs and sensors (potentiometers) inside. The chopstick has many degrees of free angular movement provided by this gimbal and overall assembly. I gently bounce ("slam"?) that chopstick off of a thing, and this results in the feedback loop that provides positioning control to provide immediate instruction to back off i…
Hey, remember when I said this?
>>>> Think of the rigidity of the whiskers as being traded off against your maximum movement speed.
Appendages on a moving object can't contact anything gently. They have to strike at whatever speed they're moving at.
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It would be great that the drone had some kind of tactile sensibility. Go slowly in the opposite direction of said contact first, then if that is not working try to rotate on one of the horizontal axis while going in the opposite direction to see if it make a difference, and if it doesn't then something is stuck on your skin, and you should be able to notice that your weight is not the same as before; if that's not t…
That would be okay if you were flying forward at a snail's pace so that initial contact doesn't take out the drone. i'm thinking of all of the times my Roomba has plowed full speed into something and then slowly backed away. If drone behaved that way, it wouldn't be very good. i'm also thinking of all of the times my drones acted that way when i was learning to fly and getting cocky. it wasn't good for them
Otherwise, yes ... I can see a world where this procedure is catastrophic.
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Huh? Suppose I've got an assembly with a chopstick attached to a gimbal with some minor centering springs and sensors (potentiometers) inside. The chopstick has many degrees of free angular movement provided by this gimbal and overall assembly. I gently bounce ("slam"?) that chopstick off of a thing, and this results in the feedback loop that provides positioning control to provide immediate instruction to back off i…
> I gently bounce ("slam"?) that chopstick off of a thing Hey, remember when I said this? >>>> Think of the rigidity of the whiskers as being traded off against your maximum movement speed. Appendages on a moving object can't contact anything gently. They have to strike at whatever speed they're moving at.
(Good luck with...whatever it is that you may be talking about. My diction is good. I don't have time or patience to explain it for outliers who aren't following along well and who also insist that it must somehow be wrong. I apologize for this; I am actually sorry.)
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You should really consider how much energy it takes to levitate an 80lb drone while flying across town, compared to how much energy it takes to roll an 8000lb van across town (even ignoring the fact that the van might deliver 100 packages while making it's way across town).
An 8,000lb van will be using fossil fuels and emit particulates from tire and brake dust. Unless it was incredibly efficient and electricity for the drones was coming from coal plants, the van would emit more pollution. But the biggest harm is people getting hit by vehicles. Delivery drones are much smaller and don't spend nearly as much time near people. Since drones can deliver stuff more quickly than large vans, t…
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Thin lightweight whiskers are going to be challenging to manage on a propeller-driven vehicle. They'll get blown all over the place. Having them extend out past the propellers will likely get them tangled in the propellers.
Sure, they'll move around in the prop wash. But that's fine, isn't it? If they're intended to detect fixed objects, then noticing that one or more of them have ceased to be blown around in that way may be a good way to detect unanticipated contact with a fixed object: When the signal becomes less noisy, then maybe something is in the way. And the whiskers don't have to be all floppy like a wet noodle. I myself am thi…
It's quite possible that these problems are solvable and can be engineered around, that there's a whisker-based solution, but I don't see it. It's certainly not an obviously workable solution.