The threat of Big Dog

[I_smell]

I know this is the point of this whole thread, but that is some future fucking sci-fi fucking shit!!!!!!!!!

[BigJKO]

That is some terrifying shit, right there..

[feelthedarkness]

One day humanity will cry out "why did we teach them to throw cinder blocks?!"

[Brannigan]

I like the idea of super advanced robots that pretty much just throw rocks.

[James]

Even your piano can turn against you now:

That's crazy! How log until we have software that can do the translation in realtime, and I can converse entirely with pianos?

[Luftmensch]

That's crazy! How log until we have software that can do the translation in realtime, and I can converse entirely with pianos?

Digital audio crap has never been perfectly real-time, but I bet it would t be too hard to take any old spectrum analyzer that works in real-time and rig it up to a piano. Last time I dropped by a music store they had player pianos that could straight record anything you played and then repeat it back at you (I bet these aren't new either), so if you had one of those maybe it wouldn't be too hard to connect them.

[tegan]

One digital audio rabbit hole that's always interested me is the tech behind Vocaloid, but I always hesitate to bring it up because the actual execution of Vocaloid is just the worst thing.

 

Also, the company that owns the rights to the Gackt Vocaloid is called INTERNET and it makes me laugh every time.

[Luftmensch]

I just checked, and while I don't have one to experiment with myself, apparently the source code for the Yamaha Disklavier player pianos is released open-source with a GNU license, which is pretty fab. Plus I think it just takes regular MIDI input, so in theory as long as you have a computer, a microphone, and a MIDI cable, you should be able to make your Disklavier say whatever you want. If you did that, you should be able to hook it up to any old keyboard and make it talk in synthesized harpsichord or shitty guitar voice.

 

Back at my last job, we'd use little CNC machines all the time, which would make hums of different pitches depending on what shapes they were cutting. My boss mentioned that he met people who programmed their CNC machines to play tunes, using what amounted to only two electric motors. I bet that if you had a robot with dozens of noisy servos, you could make it talk by moving. The hardest part would be making it not fall over when it talks.

[subbes]

[melmer]

[melmer]

i have now just realised its a sausage dog and not a robot spider. Derp

[subbes]

That's no robot, that's spiderdog.  

[Brannigan]

What if it's a doc oc situation, where the dog has metal arms fused to his spine

[Korax]

Dog-tor Octopus?

[TychoCelchuuu]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=tFrjrgBV8K0

[melmer]

Needs terminator theme

Dundun dun dundun

Dundun dun dundun

[Nachimir]

No! The way it strides along so bouncily, it needs

. I wish tubedubber still worked.

[brkl]

I cannot get over the name. It's just horrendous. 

[Nachimir]

There we go:

 

[melmer]

Funky

[Reyturner]

Makes his grand-daddy proud:

 

[subbes]

So it turns out one of my friends' coworkers worked with someone who did Original BigDog at BD and claimed that BigDog is physically capable of doing a somersault:  it has the strength in the hydraulics, the processing power to calculate how to land, etc.  

 

This blew my freakin' mind.

 

The only reason that there's no video of BigDog doing a somersault is that there was only one of them and they didn't want to take the chance of it not sticking the landing and having the robot equivalent of the video where the olympic gymnast breaks her ankle but keeps going through the pain.

[I_smell]

The thing I forget about this PETMAN strut is that the video is it walking on a treadmill- but the point is that in real life it'd be walking down the street, or some dusty highway trail.

 

Which is even more hilarious to imagine.

[lumberbaron]

So it turns out one of my friends' coworkers worked with someone who did Original BigDog at BD and claimed that BigDog is physically capable of doing a somersault:  it has the strength in the hydraulics, the processing power to calculate how to land, etc.  

 

This blew my freakin' mind.

 

The only reason that there's no video of BigDog doing a somersault is that there was only one of them and they didn't want to take the chance of it not sticking the landing and having the robot equivalent of the video where the olympic gymnast breaks her ankle but keeps going through the pain.

 

Thank you for that.  I am at work, but now need to find a way to go home and change my pants.

[toblix]

Quick, this thing!