[Dprglist] Seeing the RoboColumbus cones

[John Swindle]

Dave,
 
Great stuff. Thanks for setting me straight on the already-uniqueness of the orange cones.
 
But I'm still not making my point (largely because I'm still slowly formulating it). At the same time, I get your point, which is: Go and do it! But vision-related stuff is just not interesting for me to pursue.
 
More of my point: It's not to look for, say, an orange cone, but to look for, say, a plastic thing or a rubber thing or a wood (or non-wood) thing. Unique in the arena and likely unique in a large unconstrained space.
 
My interest in this is to build a robot that weeds the yard. I suspect that it is insufficient to look at leaf shapes, and I suspect that different plants have other signatures that will be easier to detect, as with the Earth sciences satellites that see what kind of trees are in a forest.
 
When I saw a root heater weed killer for sale (basically a soldering iron on a stick), I got interested in having a gadget wander about the yard, selectively cooking the roots of undesired plants. A vinegar spray works also, but the root heater is more precise. (A flame cultivator is more dramatic though. We had those on the cotton farm.)
 
You say we often build stuff that is purpose-built to win an arbitrary contest. In this case, I am looking for something that serves as a sensor for something beyond color and shape differences. It would be great if it involved sound! Talk to the weeds.
 
I thought we developed sight for visible light because that's what gets through the atmosphere. Water has a big impact on the atmosphere as well.
 
And so a UV sensor would be OK for a robot because it would either be designed to not get burned up by UV, or we wouldn't care that the sensor only lasted a few years. We try to anthropomorphize things too much, building our own limitations into our creations.
 
Good stuff. Back to slowly formulating now.
 
John Swindle
 


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