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Freefall is a nice little comic that I read. Today's strip makes me very happy - they got robots plausibly right!
Compare and contrast this with "Roger roger" from Star Wars: Eps 1-3. A lot of the droid stuff was cool - especially how they had special purpose-built droids that weren't necessarily anthropomorphic - and I get that robots might be given speech capacity to communicate with organics. But with each other? When it's established that they all have some sort of uplink to a giant centralized controller? Pfft.
Most of the robots in Freefall have visual sensors - the recognize Florence (the Bowman's wolf... er, the canid in the strip) on sight, for instance. But machine vision is hard and ambiguous. Why bother with that when you have a perfectly good transponder signal to pick up on?
Now, it sounds like somebody needs some more robust sensor fusion to figure out what to do when the eyes and the "ears" aren't returning the same information. But if in 50 years of operation, you've never encountered a mismatch between a transponder and your eyes, how hard are you going to be looking?
(The comic should be at this address after Monday.)
Compare and contrast this with "Roger roger" from Star Wars: Eps 1-3. A lot of the droid stuff was cool - especially how they had special purpose-built droids that weren't necessarily anthropomorphic - and I get that robots might be given speech capacity to communicate with organics. But with each other? When it's established that they all have some sort of uplink to a giant centralized controller? Pfft.
Most of the robots in Freefall have visual sensors - the recognize Florence (the Bowman's wolf... er, the canid in the strip) on sight, for instance. But machine vision is hard and ambiguous. Why bother with that when you have a perfectly good transponder signal to pick up on?
Now, it sounds like somebody needs some more robust sensor fusion to figure out what to do when the eyes and the "ears" aren't returning the same information. But if in 50 years of operation, you've never encountered a mismatch between a transponder and your eyes, how hard are you going to be looking?
(The comic should be at this address after Monday.)
