Wednesday December 9, 2009 13:14
CompInfoFuture Homework 12: “FREE: One Robot. Any Capability.” / Sensemaking
- Suppose you had a coupon for a free robot. The catch is it can only do one thing. But you can get a robot that will do whatever one thing you like, just not anything else. What would you want your robot to do?
- This is probably cheating, but I want a robot that will act as a surrogate for me in day-to-day life, leaving me to survive in a disaster-resistant womb. This robot (android) should be a better-looking version of me, like in the recent movie Surrogates.
- Another possibility would be to make a robot that somehow creates more energy than it uses; either through some chemical process (breaking down organic matter) or other, delivering electricity from raw materiel.
- If we constrain ourselves to modern-day technology, I would want a robot that purr-fectly simulated a cat, similar to Ugobe’s Pleo Robotic Dinosaur.
- Write or develop an additional significant piece of your project. As a suggestion, consider the connection of robots to your topic. However, if another subject besides robots seems more appropriate, that is just as good. Post the new section on your blog.
- I covered a bit on the applicability of robotics to my research of human-computer interaction in a previous blog post, pointing out that the research being done in robotics will someday come in useful when humans are ready to adopt non-hominid appendages and sensors.
- Instead, I would like to talk about sense-making.
- Sensemaking is the process of making sense of an ambiguous situation [Wikipedia]. The Department of Defense considers the broad case of a framework for military operations wherein nodes of the operation (soldiers, commanders, medical personnel, drones) are networked for information-sharing so that an individual’s situational awareness can be linked with others’ to provide a more complete view of a situation for all.
- In the most abstract sense, this is something we do—as citizens, shoppers, lawyers—every day. From the moment we wake up, we’re constantly probing and analyzing our senses to literally make sense of our lives. In the broader context, we network with our trusted sources (peers, family, aggregated public sentiment) to get multiple perspectives on a situation.
- One example would be comparison shopping. Jane goes into Best Buy looking for a new camcorder. She sees the prices, gets to know the layout of the display shelves and how they’re arranged, and starts looking at features. Then, she can compare those items to each other. We can say that Jane is developing situational awareness. But to escalate to sense-making, Jane needs to network: she pulls out her iPhone and consults Consumer Reports to see what this trusted source recommends. She plugs a model number into Twitter and finds scads of complaints about the camcorder. Jane is now situationally-aware.
- The implications for robotics are many. For example, after a crash-landing, autonomous Mars rovers should be able to figure out where in space and time they are from their senses, network information with other nodes, and develop a framework for existence.
- Category: Computing, Information, and the Future
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