Demystifying autonomous...

[gvarndell]

Originally Posted by kamocat

What I did to demonstrate the (un)usefulnes camera is to close one eye, and put your hands in a tube around the other eye, to give yourself that 30 degree view angle. (+-15 degrees)
What I didn't have them do is chop it to 10 frames per second. (blinking continuously might work)

Certainly not if autistic children are around, but how about adding a strobe light in a dark room?
Wear your Grandmother's glasses, patch over one eye, restrict FOV on other eye, and have a strobe going.
I would hazard a guess that most teens could fairly consistently catch a randomly tossed (soccer) ball under such conditions -- even if the strobe was off more than on.
I guess I would even predict that 6 kids could split into 2 alliances and play some decent soccer under these conditions.
They probably ought to wear helmets though

Pondering how humans can perform such a feat might foster some appreciation for the fact that robot autonomy cannot be dependent upon _knowing_ everything all the time.
A robot that could, even very poorly, approximate our powers of prediction and our ability to fill in the blanks wrt our sensory inputs would be truly amazing.