Transforming a Laptop into a Robot

NathanZ writes "Evolution Robotics is selling what looks like a docking station on wheels as a way to transform a laptop into a robot. I'm not exactly sure how this can be useful since the "robot" has no arms. According to their website, "you can train your robot to do things like recognize objects and places, send email, take pictures and video, respond to voice commands, and more!". Yipee. At least it would give me something to do with that old Toshiba laptop sitting in the closet."

Waving

[DarkZero]

Wouldn't voice recognition be better than a visual system for commands? I'd rather say "Play U2" than have to fetch a U2 CD to wave in front of its face for it to play music. And since you have to train it anyway by showing it various objects, it just seems like voice recognition would've been the smarter route.

Politcal Correctness for Robots Society says:

[samoverton]

I'm not exactly sure how this can be useful since the "robot" has no arms.

Why do so many people have this misconception that a robot has to be humanoid, or have mechanical appendages. A robot is simply any machine that performs tasks automatically. A record player is a robot. A printer is a robot. 'cron' could even be classed as a logical robot.

Of course a robot can be useful without arms!

Re:Arms do not a Robot make

[galaga79]

Not without the special astro-droid grade soundcard and speakers. Its internal sound system could only manage C64-like bleeps and whistles.

Is that so? In that case R2-D2 must possess some damn impressive bleeping and whistling ability to he recreate the audio from Obi-wan's message in Episode II and likewise Leia's message for Obi-wan in Episode IV.

"Experiment"

[Uberminky]

In my experience, very few people actually want to "experiment", when it comes down to it. Everybody gets excited about building a robot, and they talk about making it do all sorts of great things, and how they'll "train" it to do this and "train" it to do that. They'll experiment with blah and blah. The number of people that actually do, however, is sadly much lower than even I had originally suspected. (I founded the Indiana University Robotics Club, for what it's worth.) When it comes down to it, very few people have the motivation to actually do real work, that takes real time and real energy. But then, I guess that's why Mindstorms are so popular, even on Slashdot.. (You honestly wouldn't believe how much progress me and my friend have made this summer so far, compared to what the entire club accomplished all last year. This is not just our robotics club suffering this problem, either. I'm convinced that CMU's robotics club, for example, is only slightly better off than us, due entirely to funding.)

Sorry for the rant..