Embrace Your Inner Robot
I think I finally figured out who I want to be when I grow up…I love the idea of merging VR, and AR, and robotics, and high-performance networking, and cameras, and haptic feedback devices.
Also, I’m not enjoying the feeling of age creeping up on me. I remember the feeling of euphoria and freedom when sprinting - leaning into corners and feeling the air rushing against my face, arms, and legs.
I want to recapture those sensations - not just remember them, but actually experience them again.
I want to be able to experience feeling like Tony Stark inside his Ironman suit. Not by being inside a suit, because I’m certain I’d love the feeling so much I would take unnecessary risks and end up pulling 150 Gs upon hitting the ground or some other obstacle just a little too fast. It doesn’t matter if you’re inside or outside an inch of titanium when that happens - you’d either be a puddle of no-longer-organized-human on the pavement or inside the boots of your metal suit. I want to be able to feel it without having to physically do it, and risk puddling.
I want to have that feeling of flying in dreams by being virtually present, over some wide bandwidth remote control system. I guess I want to virtually BE a robot aircraft. To feel lift and the freedom of movement in three dimensions while the air rushes over my metal skin.
I want to be able to sprint around and jump and climb like a cat. Nimble and flexible, hunching my shoulders to spring, all four limbs driving powerfully as I sprint, able to redirect my motion vector to turn on a dime, as my tail balances and stabilizes my motion.
I want to BE a racecar, not the driver, the race car itself. I want to fully feel the motion, vibration, torque, and sensation of being the car. Feel the tread of the tires meeting the asphalt, the heat generated inside my engine and the strain of the RPMs, and feel the edge of the redline when I’m pushing it too far. I want to be able to revel in the raw power my metallic body can output when I choose, and if the G-force load and sensation of my tires scrubbing and burning against the asphalt as I corner is more than I can handle, I want to be able to dial back my perception of those inputs to whatever level my human body and mind can handle.
I want to be able to be whatever robot I choose via a standardized robot-to-human API.
Name Brainstorm:
Embody Robotics Embotics Human Dynamics Remote Dynamics Kinebotics You Robot RoboYou Youbot
To be a spaceship sailing through the space between stars. How cool would that be?
To sense sunlight charging my batteries as I glide through the vacuum and feel the tug of a gravity well as I pick up unbelievable speed to slingshot around a gravitational body.
Limitations imposed by the speed of light would increase latency and make it difficult to feel truly present and connected in real time. Unless some hybrid of real and simulated sensory feed could fill in the gaps until the data stream catches up. Perhaps a system that scans the environment, maps it, and allows the user to experience simulated sensations, while the output commands, such as walking, driving, or firing the rockets, until events in the real world catch up and are fed back in some kind of updated new version of reality.
What a fantastic use for powerful high-speed actuators. How much more exciting to build a robot arm that I can manipulate directly and feel like it is my own arm or arms, rather than have it programmed to follow a preset path or be controlled entirely by some software?
The movie Surrogates shows a world where people have lost touch with their physical selves and rely on robotic representations free from the physical limitations of their own bodies. I’m not suggesting we would ever want this to be our reality, but I think it would be fantastic to offer people renewed mobility, or new levels of strength and vigor - experiences previously thought impossible.
I want to don a virtual wingsuit, to *be* a surfboard or snowboard, carving through powder. I want to feel what it is like to be the sort of person GoPro cameras are marketed to without risking a trip to the Orthopedist.
I want the technology to exist that would me to experience these things via remote sensing. Unless of course I manage to become a super-powerful AI and spawn copies of myself to run directly on the car/spaceship/cat robot hardware directly, and then feed the experience back to prime-me sometime later...
High Bandwidth Low Latency Universal Control Standard
Machine learning systems may be needed to take your inputs - physical motion, data from controllers/joysticks you are manipulating, your thoughts in some cases - and then mix and map them intelligently onto a newly defined universal control standard. The data streams are then transmitted and fed into the robot’s input control channels specific to the unit’s configuration and used to drive its actuators.
High bandwidth, ultra-low-latency feedback channels would need to exist within the standard, through which image data and sensory feedback streams are fed from the robot back to the user, closing the feedback loop in ways that allow the human to feel and learn how to deeply experience the various sensations.
Other machine learning systems would be needed to intelligently map volumes of data streaming back in realtime from the robot - fine tuned based on your preferences and whatever haptic feedback equipment you own - mapping to devices that press against you, generate compressive forces, cause heating and cooling, and tactile devices simulating texture.
This strong kinesthetic connection to the robot you embody is essential, not only in terms of feedback data sent from the robot back to you, but also in terms of the translation of your own movements/thoughts/intention onto the motion applied to the robot itself.
The control scheme is fine tuned to you and unique to each of the variety of robots you control. For example, running around at high speed like a cat might involve your shoulders operating like the shoulders on a cheetah, with hind legs following automatically by themselves, or you might choose to be on all fours like a quadruped, arms and legs controlling each on the robot individually. You might even prefer to use a joystick or a mouse, with feedback mapped to tactile devices strapped to your legs or feet. Or you might communicate intention and get feedback via direct connection to neurons in your brain - mapping output and input to sensations no other human could ever experience exactly the way that you do.