Carnegie Mellon Robotics Lab

Ion Todirel wrote:

Scoble?

I think that little soccer playing robot is so cool. I liked how it actualy tracked the ball.

So 2050 is the year Robots vs Humans in a soccer game.

"The Segway is capable of speeds up to 20 miles per hour. A speed-governing key is used to limit the speed of the personal transport model to 10 miles per hour, or "three times faster than the average walker." "As of June 2000, the fastest running human is Michael Johnson, 1996 set the world record of running 200 meters in 19.32 seconds. Johnson's record can be calculated to equal 10.35 m/s or 37.267 km/h
Ill be rooting for the Robots.

a lot of interesting things going on in robotics...

anyone going to be at AAAI that's coming up?

Organizational research: the feedback loop model. (CS-CE oriented)

Let's acknowledge the fact a pipeline model, although useful, and simple, does not necessarily provide the most extensive ways to find innovative ideas and turn them into products.

Great products are often built on an initial good idea, but require constant seeding to keep evolving. A lot of input comes from marketing feed, and it is necessary. On the other hand product development, in itself, generates a lot of side technology which is usually not exploited due to time/budget constraints, and simple irrelevance to the priorities at hand.

Research is not necessarily product driven, and the goal are more about developing concepts and building proof of concepts.

The classical pipeline model usually relies on hypothetical communication between those two layers, each with distinct goals. The idea would be to come up with an organization that would provide a tighter integration, in order to not only feed research into development, but also feed back some development ideas into research.

The process would be split into three different teams. The first team would look like a conventional research team, in charge of exploring ideas, and building proof of concepts. The second team would look like a product team, but on a lightweight scale. It would monitor the work of the research team, and identify meaningful ideas they will productize. As a lightweight development team, it will follow a development process, where the goal would not be to actually kick something out the door, but rather to provide development-oriented insights that will be fed back into the research team. Just as in a neural net, you would then witness an exploration process where convergence is driven by a feedback loop. The third team would have the goal of monitoring the two other teams, possibly providing some higher level feedback, but most importantly identifying short term products and feeding them into the marketing and engineering teams. Another goal for this team could be to facilitate technology transfers between this organization and engineering.

As a whole those three teams would remain a research organization, but could provide a strong interleave of engineering and research skills and knowledge.

One could question the amount of resources needed for funding such an organization, which is, in itself, an organizational research project, but the pipeline model although simple has shown limits. It would be easy to name large companies which have faced the situation where despite having funded massive research efforts, and actually having found great concepts, never turned them into real-life products. Then, the amount of resources used is quite large, even for a pipeline model.

Pierre Leclercq