My present research project at Georgia Tech: remote teleoperation with force feedback. Basically it's "extreme" remote-control robotics. I mean we're talking about distances to the other side of the world or to space with plenty of time delay. So there's a time difference between when you ask the robot to do something and when the robot actually does it (kind of like me). Coupled with force feedback (i.e. you can feel what the robot feels to a certain extent), it can drive the robot (and your control stick) insane by the mystical laws of control algorithm. My predecessor has already designed a control that could tame such a robot but he has only tested it on a virtual robot. My job is to try it out on a real robot.
The picture above is the Phantom, which we will probably buy for our lab. You can think of it as a 3D mouse with force feedback. So if there's a 3D virtual object in the computer, I can "feel" it with this gizmo (any 3D virtual nude woman for download online?). Pretty cool huh? It costs next to nothing too ... like 20k bucks. I will probably end up using it as the new control stick, and if we're to get another Phantom, that machine may become the actual slave robot. Eventually we will move on to controlling some massive hydraulic cranes as the slave robot, hopefully without punching holes in the building (it has happened before).
So far this project has been quite interesting, though not too sure if I want to make that my thesis. Haven't been doing anything except reading past thesis and trying out parts of the simulation codes (as if that's not enough). When this Phantom gadget arrives I'll probably have to figure out how to modify it to suit my primary purpose. That is of course to feel 3D virtual naked woman. Only been one semester on this project, so wish me luck!
Update (2/6/03): Got my 2nd Phantom at last, though partly through my fault I got the specs a bit wrong. Hehehe! Still no virtual naked womam though. Boohoohoo! Not that it's too big of a deal. Now we're really in business of some serious experimentation of remote fondling. Really gonna be pushing the computers since we got 3 or 4 highest priority threads fighting to update every one millisecond. Maybe I should lie to my prof about slow machines so he will get me new faster ones. Muwahahaha! |
