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A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community
About Me :
I'm a grownup nerd living in the Boston burbs. I write computer programs for a living and plays for fun.
I'm married to a wonderful woman, and we share a nice little house with our daughter and our cats.
I'm a humanist, a technologist, an artist, and an idealist. I believe in reason, freedom, love, equality,
and democracy. (Did I mention that I'm
an idealist? I did, OK.)
I'm also a pragmatist and an empiricist. I reject ideology and dogma, especially when they conflict with
practical facts (i.e., pretty much always). I particularly hate willful ignorance, which tends to go hand-in-hand
with ideology and dogma.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Monday, January 03, 2005
All Hail Robosapien!
Robosapien is more than just the coolest toy of 2004. It's a huge breakthrough in product design, if not applied robotics. Although Robosapien isn't as impressive in terms of its absolute capabilities as the Sony Qrio robot, it has the distinct advantage of being on sale to the general public. You can't buy the Qrio at any price, although the Qrio would likely set you back, well, who knows how much? Maybe a hundred thousand dollars? It all depends on how many Sony could produce, and how quickly they'd like to earn back their substantial investment. You can buy an Aibo right now, but that's going to cost you anywhere from $500 up to $2,000, depending on which model you buy and whether you buy new or used. (Just search eBay for "Aibo").
The breakthrough of Robosapien is that a very impressive set of robotic functionality has been crammed into a package that sells for less than $100 on a toy-store shelf. It's not a very sophisticated robot, and it doesn't do a lot of things people might want a robot to do. But when you match real capabilities with real prices, Robosapien is a winner because it does what it does at a price point people are willing to pay.
Remember the Atari 2600? I can tell you from personal experience that it wasn't much of a computer. There are cheap pocket calculators being sold today with more horsepower than the Atari VCS. In 1977, though, it was a big deal. For most of the million or so people who bought the Atari console, it was the first computer they'd ever had in their homes. And they bought it for about $200. Sure, you could buy an Apple II for about $1,500 stripped, or more like $2,500 for a really useful configuration; and the Apple II was definitely more versatile, though both machines are puny by today's standards*. (The two machines shared the same microprocessor, the beloved and much-lamented 6502) But it was probably the Atari which blazed the trail, started the market, and showed the way. I'm sure a lot of people noticed, by the 2600's example, that it was possible to build a product with a microprocessor in it, and people would buy them in the millions.
The reason we have such great computers today is because somebody started the ball rolling with an inexpensive product, with minimal capabilities, which jump-started a market. Once it became clear that a set of technologies could be packaged and productized and sold at a profit, successive generations of products could be developed in a snowball of increasing price-performance ratios. I believe we are at or close to that point with robotics today, and that in 30 years, we may look back at Robosapien as one of the initiators of the robotics snowball.
There's one other reason I love Robosapien. I admire Mark Tilden, the engineer behind Robosapien. A professor of mine used to say, "An engineer is someone who can do for a dollar what any fool can do for ten." Mark Tilden is a real engineer. Hats off to him, and all hail Robosapien!
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*(By way of comparison: a typical Apple II ran at 1 MHz, had 48K of memory, and had a disk drive with a capacity of 140K. The computer I'm typing this on runs about 2000 times faster, has 10,000 times the memory, and a disk drive with a capacity about half a million times as large -- not to mention a much higher-resolution display, Internet access, and a whole host of features unavailable on the biggest of big iron in the 1970s -- all for a price point roughly equivalent to the Apple II, in 2004 dollars to boot!)
0 comments
Robosapien is more than just the coolest toy of 2004. It's a huge breakthrough in product design, if not applied robotics. Although Robosapien isn't as impressive in terms of its absolute capabilities as the Sony Qrio robot, it has the distinct advantage of being on sale to the general public. You can't buy the Qrio at any price, although the Qrio would likely set you back, well, who knows how much? Maybe a hundred thousand dollars? It all depends on how many Sony could produce, and how quickly they'd like to earn back their substantial investment. You can buy an Aibo right now, but that's going to cost you anywhere from $500 up to $2,000, depending on which model you buy and whether you buy new or used. (Just search eBay for "Aibo").
The breakthrough of Robosapien is that a very impressive set of robotic functionality has been crammed into a package that sells for less than $100 on a toy-store shelf. It's not a very sophisticated robot, and it doesn't do a lot of things people might want a robot to do. But when you match real capabilities with real prices, Robosapien is a winner because it does what it does at a price point people are willing to pay.
Remember the Atari 2600? I can tell you from personal experience that it wasn't much of a computer. There are cheap pocket calculators being sold today with more horsepower than the Atari VCS. In 1977, though, it was a big deal. For most of the million or so people who bought the Atari console, it was the first computer they'd ever had in their homes. And they bought it for about $200. Sure, you could buy an Apple II for about $1,500 stripped, or more like $2,500 for a really useful configuration; and the Apple II was definitely more versatile, though both machines are puny by today's standards*. (The two machines shared the same microprocessor, the beloved and much-lamented 6502) But it was probably the Atari which blazed the trail, started the market, and showed the way. I'm sure a lot of people noticed, by the 2600's example, that it was possible to build a product with a microprocessor in it, and people would buy them in the millions.
The reason we have such great computers today is because somebody started the ball rolling with an inexpensive product, with minimal capabilities, which jump-started a market. Once it became clear that a set of technologies could be packaged and productized and sold at a profit, successive generations of products could be developed in a snowball of increasing price-performance ratios. I believe we are at or close to that point with robotics today, and that in 30 years, we may look back at Robosapien as one of the initiators of the robotics snowball.
There's one other reason I love Robosapien. I admire Mark Tilden, the engineer behind Robosapien. A professor of mine used to say, "An engineer is someone who can do for a dollar what any fool can do for ten." Mark Tilden is a real engineer. Hats off to him, and all hail Robosapien!
-----
*(By way of comparison: a typical Apple II ran at 1 MHz, had 48K of memory, and had a disk drive with a capacity of 140K. The computer I'm typing this on runs about 2000 times faster, has 10,000 times the memory, and a disk drive with a capacity about half a million times as large -- not to mention a much higher-resolution display, Internet access, and a whole host of features unavailable on the biggest of big iron in the 1970s -- all for a price point roughly equivalent to the Apple II, in 2004 dollars to boot!)
