Nerdgasm.

Just fuck.

It's insane what solutions people come up with to problems. Communicating via 2 way colour flashing to work out who is being talked to is just whacky.

Probably wouldn't work in the real world very well, line of site stuff rarely does, but they'd further refine it down to an idea that works in a wide range of environments I'm sure.

*engineering

Adding video to channels (Engineering) - requested by dingens.

Couldn't each ground unit just flash with a unique id code? ...and couldn't each instruction from the aerial unit then use a coded prefix to direct individual ground units? ...and couldn't that happen on the millisecond time scale?
The disco lights don't seem very efficient?

So when people report seeing flashing colored lights on UFOs, the aliens are communicating with robots on the ground? Interesting...

Sure, they're plying us with conveniently delivered snack foods now, but then they will come down the street in the new "Kill all humans" formation and we will all be too fat to run away.

As grinter mentioned, there seems to be more reliable methods of identification than the 3 coloured LED solution.

The nerd within is pulling his hair off and screaming: "Where's the bloody explanation on why colour coded light is the best solution for this problem?"... This video is far from nerd worthy.

Ohhh, I get it now, SkyNet.

My real life robot RTS game just got air support.

"out of the lab and into the real world"

interpret as:

a) large noisy flying aircraft in your living room coordinating junk food transport
b) skynet / ground based terminator scenario in countries with petroleum deposits

Brilliant!!!

Seige Tanks and a Banshee? Better hope you're playing against a total noob Zerg.

>> ^grinter:

Couldn't each ground unit just flash with a unique id code? ...and couldn't each instruction from the aerial unit then use a coded prefix to direct individual ground units? ...and couldn't that happen on the millisecond time scale?
The disco lights don't seem very efficient?


The problem is that the "skybot/drone" is using a relatively inexpensive webcam. These things don't have a very good framerate, and there are a lot of factors that ccould drop frames. If any frame is dropped, then it would misinterpret the "ID" of the ground robot. A webcam is good at discerning red vs. green vs. blue. Something that is faster- IR from a TV remote- has the problem of being non-dimensional, so the drone wouldn't know which ground robot was "talking". Something that might be neat would be the 2D IR sensor from a WiiMote, but I'm not sure what kind of framerate those are capable of.

Also, adding extra sensors to the drone, or getting better ones, or using a faster cpu, would not only increase cost, but more importantly decrease battery life of the drone.

Probably the speed of the LED blinking identification was slowed down for this demo, so it could be explained to the viewers. It's likely capable of going much faster.

The main problem I see in "real world" application is daylight - if it's bright outside, it's much harder to discern color. But at least if our robot overlords attack at night, we'll see them coming in rainbow glory!

Nah, its clearly Seige Tanks and Science Vessel

Ok, so they use different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum to select different robots. I was doing that when I was 12 years old. My brother and
I both had remote control cars. If we wanted to use them at the same time we had to use different frequency crystals. Planes are equipped with a transponder which broadcasts an identification and sometimes altitude so ground radar can tag them more effectively. Couldn't you basically do the same thing with these robots, or just use the same process as in this video only instead of using the visible spectrum just use a lower frequency wave and all its advantages.

Or, you could actually use the advantages of high frequency and "point" at the robots you wanted to select rather than broadcasting to all of them and selecting through a process of elimination (which could take a while if you wanted to select multiple robots out of a large group).

So yah, I agree with everybody else. Unless they have some very specific design contraints this doesn't seem like a very elegant solution (although it does utilise the hardware they already have - cameras and lights).>> ^Payback:

Seige Tanks and a Banshee? Better hope you're playing against a total noob Zerg.