[rescue] You want balls?

[Mike F]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tim H." <lists at pellucidar.net>
To: "The Rescue List" <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 18, 2003 11:00 AM
Subject: Re: [rescue] You want balls?

> Please tell me there are pictures of Josh mounted to this robot! :-)  I
> have this picture in my head of a large industrial robot with Josh
> mountd on the end of the arm being used to attach pieces to a car on an
> assembly line.

One would NOT want to be mounted to one of those robots. In my
high-school robotics class (we actually had a GMF robot to play with)
the teacher loved to remind us all that you don't want to make a mistake
programming these things. He had seen one whose limits were set
incorrectly, and the robot's arm crashed into a Bridgeport (milling machine)
and actually launched it across the room. I don't wanna know what it
would to to a person. In the interests of staying semi on-topic, at one
of my previous employers the senior designers used SGI machines running
RobCAD to simulate such robots. They used Indys and some deskside SGI
machines which I really wish I could remember (I didn't know anything
about real hardware then, around 1993-95.) They were about the size of
dorm refrigerators, maybe a little smaller, and that's as specific as I can
get.