Is that rolex attached the robotic arm? haha There's no way that thing will last that deep.

For a PS3 tech demo it's rather solid. Considering the environment and robotic arms are quite low poly, and that the vast majority go the character, it looks pretty solid. Add the modern mocap (developed by Weta Digital, used most famously in Avatar) it's fairly compelling.

Unfortunately so long as most game developers are working on console hardware so many generations behind, we'll never actually see this. I mean the most graphically impressive game is 'still' Crysis and that was made in 07. I personally suspect the next innovative game technologically will probably come from a small dev house, with good backers and enough time and expertise to really push gaming technically again. And of course the primary platform will have to be the PC.

>> ^Asmo:

>> ^Nebosuke:
It's like a chipjet printer... I suppose it all still needs to be soldered though?

Not sure, the tech manual mentions that solder paste is a consumable but doesn't mention specifically about soldering. The board might also pass over a wave solder tank further along the line.


It uses a solder paste that's basically screen printed (0:08 in the video) on the board before the components are placed.
The larger integrated chips seem to be mounted at the next machine (they require a different robot arm to do this) but at the end of the line it goes in a linear oven to melt the solder, couldn't be simpler.

Any large components are soldered after this in a wave solder tank or manually by hand.

In 5 years we will all giggle at this, in 10 people will say mockingly "8.429 GHz is the record frequency for a processor". In 15 years I'll use my new robot arms to punch you in the face...so suck on my telescopic robo-dick

Nah, these are pretty great and much better than a traditional tablet for end-to-end drawing. Do you draw, Westy?

Traditional tablets are just messy... try to draw a straight line up or down... every stroke is a goddamned irritating process of trial and error. The tablet, your arm/hand, and the monitor, all have their own "square" orientation.

After ten years owning a couple Intuos tablets I have not gotten any better at drawing with it (while my pen+paper drawing skills have improved greatly). I have left my 21" Intuos unplugged for most of the time I owned it, in fact. This is because I have to look at a screen while my hand is in another place using the stylus. It feels like trying to draw with some kind of robot arm holding the pen. Looking directly at your hand, and directly at what you're drawing, makes it so much more natural.

The only way I can do any good "drawing" with an Intuos is to draw it on paper first then scan it in and "ink" it with the Intuos. Sort of defeats a large part of the concept of a digital art tablet.

>> ^westy:

This is the stupidest shit ever fucking hell.
it looked like the image was a 3d render rather than a drawing , and on-top of that its the type of drawing you could draw with a mouse prity much using splines as fast as you could with a pen.
I mean the basic wakom is gr8 if your used to working with paper and pens and its a good way to sketch things out with that style of drawing but really a good artist can probably produce the same end result with same effort using basic mid range wacom. the cintequ and above range are nice but they are far to clunky and impractical.
I think they should focus effort on a very portable wacom pad that's basicly like an I pad but specifcaly for drawing comes with latest photoshop and loads of drawing tools , + high rez digital cam built in.

regardless of the products which are for the most part really good . The protentois nature of this advert is a joke and utter bullshit.

I'd like to propose a means of punishment for those two. It involves some flexible objects and a spanking robot arm in a small cell without light.

Thanks for the correction.

In reply to this comment by radx:
The clip in the description is quite unrelated. Those delivery towers of VW in Wolfsburg are not parking garages, they are storage silos for recently produced cars.

Both silos are connected to the production facility via an underground tunnel, and if you decide to pick up your recently purchased car yourself, they'll give you a tour, a meal, the works. Then you get to see your car picked up by the robot arm and delivered to you on the ground floor without having driven a single mile.

It's quite impressive, actually. Just like the price tag on everything they build.

The clip in the description is quite unrelated. Those delivery towers of VW in Wolfsburg are not parking garages, they are storage silos for recently produced cars.

Both silos are connected to the production facility via an underground tunnel, and if you decide to pick up your recently purchased car yourself, they'll give you a tour, a meal, the works. Then you get to see your car picked up by the robot arm and delivered to you on the ground floor without having driven a single mile.

It's quite impressive, actually. Just like the price tag on everything they build.

>> ^spoco2:

@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/budzos" title="member since October 30th, 2006" class="profilelink">budzos Why do you say that? Is it not amazing to have a self contained machine being able to listen to, understand, and correctly answer natural language questions better than humans?
Is it not difficult to see that this is a pretty amazing step along the way to creating machines that can converse with us with spoken word like robots in Science Fiction Films?
How is that not exciting?


I agree with the sentiment of the answer! AI has been my sci-fi hope for as long as I can remember. Probably why I thought "The moon is the harsh mistress" is the best book ever. When I was back in college, one of the papers I wrote was on the current state of AI, and the likelihood of the AI we see in TV and movies coming to fruition. It is amazing, and frustratingly slow field of discovery. It has taken 30 years just to begin to start to code machines to interpret language. In pursuit of this, we have come to a better understanding of how complex human speech is, and how powerful the brain is in understanding this very complex arena.

With that said, Watson doesn't "understand" or answer questions better than humans. There are many clips of the respondents just failing to beat Watson to the buzzer, most likely possessing the correct answer. Watson is the same level of impressive as the normal champs, but with mechanical reflexes. Give the humans robotic arms, and I am sure it would be a level playing field. Or, give Watson the questions one word like the humans have to do. He gets his input all in one text file and starts parsing for information before the humans have had the entirety of the question read to them (though, Watson's speed might be as such that this is trivial).

Also, as of yet, computers don't have "understanding". They can answer questions in a way that seems to make them intelligible, but they don't understand. Understanding comes from consciousness. It is still only understands the wold in terms of syntax. It is able to apply this language of syntax to properly answer trivia, but has no understanding of what the question even means. It doesn't have any experiences which are necessary for understanding. It is like if you train a parrot to respond with the correct answers to trivia questions, it doesn't actually know what it is saying.

Watson is the better parts of a parrot, and a repository of human facts. Philosophically, I am convinced that true "AI" is impossible...but I hope I am wrong! None the less, this is still super exciting, and unprecedented...how can you compare it to Sanjaya!

OMG!!!! At the end of the video, the entire sea floor just starts falling and falling and then you can't even see it anymore!!!

OMG OMG! The earth is falling!! Soon we'll be like, so far away from the robot arm, we won't even be here anymore cause we'll be too far away to even be seen!

Edit: Upvoted for the unintentional comedic value.

Your video, Wooden Robotic Arm, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Thanks, appreciated!

In reply to this comment by arvana:
That's some *quality craftsmanship!

Sure, the assembly line day laborer may lose his job to the robotic arm, but other jobs will be created to manufacture those arms, write the software for them, service them, etc.

One factory for industrial robots is enough to supply a vast number of regular factories. The whole chain is done in this area, from software development to robot design to robot construction and naturally, it takes less manhours than it saves through increased productivity, or else it wouldn't be done in the first place.

Let's take a look at Volkswagen. Last I heard, they need an increase of 7% in sales just to keep up with rising productivity. 7% more sales or 7% less workers or 7% less wages ... every year. To see the consequences of this, one only needs to take a look at Bremerhaven or any train station along the railroad line from the factories in Wolfsburg, Braunschweig and Hannover (not to mention the ones in southern Germany) to the northern harbours, where the vehicles are brought to be shipped out. Enough bloody cars to fill the English Channel, everywhere you look. That's not sustainable, not in the least. And yet they still want to keep a dying automobile manufacturer (Opel) alive ...

Just a few days, two key railroad switches at Wunstorf were shut down for maintenance, now there are countless car trains stuck at the classification yards, enough to mobilize the whole bloody state. And they are not even back to pre-crisis production levels.

What I'm saying is this: they produce more cars than ever, more than any current market can take, and even though it takes vastly more work to build a modern car than it did 50 years ago, they still need considerably less manhours per car. That includes all the suppliers as well. And they should be damn proud of it, because that's what previous generations worked for. However, it is basically kept alive artificially and has to collapse eventually. That'll be fun. Opel will be the first, 2011 at the latest.

Only completely new areas have the ability to create enough jobs to remotely compensate for the loss caused by increased productivity and saturated markets. Telecommunications was the last one, renewable energy will most likely be the next one.

That said, there will always be endless work that needs to be done, just not jobs that create an income. For instance, the national railroad could use at least the 100k people back they let go over the last 2 decades. Though to get everything done according to regulations, 200k should be a closer bet. But since it's more profitable to cut maintenance personal by another 10%, the status of the infrastructure can only be described as desolate in large parts of the country.

Edit: damn, that's 3/4 just rambling ... sorry.

http://www.physorg.com/news161960925.html
This morning, at precisely 8:57 a.m. ET, a carefully orchestrated maneuver was carried out 350 miles above the Atlantic coastline of Africa, marking the successful end of the fifth and final shuttle servicing mission.

Ever so gently, the Atlantis crew released the grapple fixture on the shuttle’s robotic arm, allowing Hubble to resume orbiting Earth on its own, as it has done since its deployment in April 1990. After Hubble’s thousands of orbits, thousands of images, five tune-ups and countless discoveries, a space shuttle crew is leaving this great observatory for the last time.

>> ^AeroMechanical:
Scale. I need scale.
Is this a real giant squid or just a big squid?

I'd wager that the ROV shown in the vid is similar to a Centurion QX series 200 or 300 -- LxWxH: 2500mm x 1700mm x 1700mm which would put that squid at around or less than 1.7m (based on positioning of the camera and the type of robotic arm)


>> ^StukaFox:
They're spineless, amazingly dumb and will attack things without reason or warning.

Cephalopods are known to be [one of] the most intelligent invertebrates (O_o') there are ... Humboldt (link to documentary @ amazon.com ) hunt schools of fish [voraciously] in large packs and have been known to cooperate and communicate quite well (think wolves and dolphins) ... plus, a brotha's gotta eat!

>> As such, they're know as The Republicans of the Sea.

Methinks your comment gives squid a bad name.