Posted by
Sul_DUPE1, around 17th December 2005:
Not really but browsing through the electronics section gave me a shock when I saw the picture.
www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obido...
heh
did you know it's half-past reality, as regards the robot gun turret thing?
eg 1:
DIY RoboCop
It's always a little spooky the first time you ever build something that affects the real world. And I was going to recite my own experience of that then looked at the result and realised that what was a big thing then is now so basic a task that the story lost all its impact.
Similarly, this particular experiment is a glorious example of the commoditising of computer science:
Someone has built, quickly and casually, a human-targetting self-aiming self-firing gun. He's just used toys immediately to hand for many Americans, but 20 years ago, this was a major Pentagon project.
The opening seconds of this little movie are chilling. The robot gun with a stupid vicious limited little mind of its own, utterly disconnected from the consequences of its actions. Frighteningly reminiscent of Politicians.
Click on the pic to see the gun move, identify a human, then shoot him when he moves:
The original goal was to have it imitate that chilling scene in RoboCop: the gun would order the person to freeze, and shoot after 5 seconds if the person didn't.
How We Built the Quintessential Sentry Gun
Okay, "quintessential" might be going a little far, but it's enough to frighten me. The idea of this project was to create a fully-automated sentry gun, capable of picking out a human target and accurately tracking and shooting him or her in the heart. Really, the idea was to find a cool robotics project for the summer while I was working at an advertising agency, and I'd only ever seen sentry guns in movies (like Congo) and video games (Half-Life 1, Half-Life 2, Team Fortress Classic). I couldn't find any record of anyone building one, even the military, although it seems likely I just didn't look hard enough. It's a pretty simple technology. One of my friends did mention the Phalanx anti-missile gun, which is of similar design, but uses radar for tracking instead of an optical method. The Phalanx has been around since the early 80's. He was also quick to add that there are some pretty good reasons for not building an optical sentry gun, a big one being that it's generally a good idea to shoot down any missile headed in your direction, but that same philosophy may not be the best when applied to humans. If you're here just to see my little brother get shot with it, scroll to the bottom. :)
Construction
The first part of this fun little summer project was to write all of the necessary computer code to control the turret. I started by learning Microsoft's DirectShow technology and utilizing the OpenCV library according to the tutorial by R. Laganiere to access the pixels being sent by my web cam. If you try to use the tutorial, you'll have to use the new library paths for DirectX 9 because the ones in the tutorial are a little outdated. I used simple algorithms from a Machine Vision course I took at Boston University to develop the aiming program. For those interested, it's just background differencing, thresholding, recursive region segmentation, your standard binary morphological operators to clean up static, and my own quick algorithm (basically simple template matching) to take care of camera shake and reduce background motion interference.
via Slashdot
Amusingly, it was a mechanical version of this which created the UK Judiciary's knee-jerk reflex which causes Homeowners so many problems in the UK when attempting to protect themselves against burglars. In the 19th Century, TripGuns were used to discourage poachers: a gun on a swivel was setup with wires running off into the surrounding forest, and when a poacher hit the wire, the gun would swivel to aim down the wire and shoot. This was eventually ruled in the Courts as being a bit out of order. And in modern times, rather than homeowners' lawyers citing simple Self Defence against Apprehended Assault --which IS a valid defence to the charge of assaulting a burglar in the dark at 3am: no change in the law is necessary, merely that lawyers pull their heads out their arses and use the whole of the law rather than one tiny reminiscence-- they have this reflex memory of these Precedents on an unrelated charge, as do the judges, and the case is decided on this basis.
How far we've come.
eg 2:
Speak of the Devil
I blogged about the casually homebuilt RoboCop style self-aiming, self-firing gun a week and a half ago.
Turns out a commercial/military version has also been built and was demo'd just Monday this week. By god, that's fast work.
It differs from the college kid's toy in that:
a/ it's not a toy
b/ it uses sound and infrared to target targets
c/ it's not a toy
Spooky...
Testers struck pieces of metal to simulate gunshots. REDOWL quickly aimed its infrared camera and laser rangefinder at the source of the noise, just as it did in tests at a Medfield gun range.
REDOWL is based on iRobot's PackBot, a battery-powered lightweight robot already in active service with the armed forces. PackBots are used to explore dangerous terrain or enter buildings to search for booby traps.
Go Terminator, go.
they are on to us dockles...