Carpentopod: A Walking Table Project(decarpentier.nl) |
Carpentopod: A Walking Table Project(decarpentier.nl) |
No. Don't.
Read the whole damned article. It's _great!_
The video of the table obediently delivering a beer and bowl of snacks to the owner says it all.
“Be back in a few hun, just taking the table for a walk.”
As opposed to work related engineering, where you shall KISS as posible to keep your sanity (And more often than not fail in the process)
"Since this post has gone public, many people have asked me if they could get one as well. I’m currently not making these on demand. However, I’ve decided to release the Carpentopod linkage itself as public domain. So if you have the skills, feel free to use the details below to build your own set of legs!"
> To select which ones were best, each variation got assigned a ‘fitness’ score based on its walking speed, clearance and material use. I also rewarded extra points to variants that had leg tips which moved more horizontally and more smoothly during the lowest third of their cycle to make it favor solutions in which a group of three legs would work together to minimize bobbing and foot slip.
I am not sure what approach was used here, it sounds like RL or maybe just simulations. I am not sure I’d say this is AI.
By the end of the article I was impressed.
When is this thing coming to a nearby IKEA? Can't wait!
While I think the computation system described in this post is very cool and sophisticated, I liken it more to a computation engine. It seems to me that computation engines follow an algorithm to determine optimal paths to a previously determined and fixed desired outcome, but they don’t update the outcome goal based on new information.
If the computation engine described in this post could use existing information to form its own goal or idea of a desired outcome, then I’d say it’s AI.
I’d love to do a blog post on this idea because I am sure many might have good reasons to disagree with it. It would be cool if someone else does it, I’d love to provide feedback as I don’t have the time for longform writing.
Keep It Simple Stupid, Active Sanity Saver
lead software engineer at IKEA (primary areas: design system and accessibility community) so I'd say yes.