Blogs

Hizook, one of my favorite blogs, has a great rant on one of my favorite peeves: UAV videos that show performance only possible with crazy expensive motion capture systems that are only found in a few well-funded university labs:

It also covers other sins of robotic demo videos, such as not being clear what's teleoperated and what's autonomous, speeding up time, tethering and scripting. Check out the whole thing, but here's the start:

Movies and scifi books inspire roboticists to push the envelope, but they've also skewed the public's perception of robot capabilities. This problem is being exacerbated by researchers.  In the last three months, I've had to shatter a few dreams: "Your $300 AR.Drone or $150 Ladybird will not be able to perform insane autonomous aerial maneuvers (yet). The UPenn quadrotors rely on a $20k-$50k camera-based (Vicon) motion capture systems, which provide global pose estimation of each UAV at millimeter-accuracies at up to 1kHz (and often uses an external, centralized motion planning computer too)."  That this crucial aspect of the videos does not register with intelligent people means that researchers are being disingenuous and violating their duty to the public -- which sucks, because their projects and research are awesome!   And this is just the example that happens to be most salient to me at the moment.  In this post I'd like to explore some "best practices" for robot videos so that we can quit misleading one another.