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Toys Robotics

Automated Sentry Robots 216

Posted by michael from the angry-cat dept.
jimbob5 writes "New Scientist reports that you can now buy your own automated Room Defender. 'Who would like this gift? Any child, or anyone who saw the director's cut of Aliens and dreamed of owning one of those automated sentries.'" The New Scientist gift guide looks pretty useful.
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Automated Sentry Robots More

Automated Sentry Robots

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  • I can see it now. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Le Marteau ( 206396 ) on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:19PM (#10768370) Journal
    Once triggered, it issues a verbal warning then fires a warning shot (a foam disc).

    Oh yeah. I can see it now. How long before someone bolts their .357 to the thing, rigs up a solenoid trigger-puller set up to activate when the "foam discs" are supposed to launch.

    Jehovah's witnesses might have something to worry about.

    • Re:I can see it now. (Score:4, Funny)

      by billysielu ( 818427 ) on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:24PM (#10768432) Homepage
      what sort of pansy alien gets stopped by foam discs?!

      • Re:I can see it now. (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Chundra ( 189402 )
        From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

        "For thousands more years, the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming onto the first planet they came across -- which happened to be the Earth -- where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog."

      • This one... [sluggy.com]

        You see, Santa was overcome by some DNA-altering aliens who thought he was an arms smuggler because he carried NERF toys around and....

        oh well.. read the comic. is it not nifty?
    • Foam/serrated Ninja Throwing stars....Its all relative in the eye of the beholder.

    • Re:I can see it now. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Tackhead ( 54550 )
      > Oh yeah. I can see it now. How long before someone bolts their .357 to the thing, rigs up a solenoid trigger-puller set up to activate when the "foam discs" are supposed to launch.

      A .357 would have to be aimed. This 'bot doesn't have good enough aiming capabilities for a handgun to be effective.

      Swap out the foam-disk shooters with a pair of shotgun shells, and now you're talking. Fire both shells simultaneously, because the recoil will probably send the 'bot flying backwards.

      For bonus points, w

      • "Swap out the foam-disk shooters with a pair of shotgun shells, and now you're talking. Fire both shells simultaneously, because the recoil will probably send the 'bot flying backwards.":

        Hmmm dunno, IMHO a flamethrower/TOW missle combo would be more aplicitable. Neither really have a recoil, plus flamethrower doesn't really need to be aimed much and the TOW has all the targeting stuff built in.

    • Great. A bunch of little illegitimate gadgets runnig around beeping Mommy, Daddy.

  • I'm too late! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ArmageddonLord ( 607418 ) * on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:19PM (#10768372)
    I've wanted to build one of these things for years. However my goals were a little higher. Complete motion tracking camera/servo system, and it would have fired paintballs or airsoft BBs... Too bad I never thought of the downgrade to common toy as a great selling point. Guess I'm and engineer and not a businessman.

  • Exit the room or there will be... trouble! (Score:5, Funny)

    by mfh ( 56 ) on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:19PM (#10768375) Homepage Journal
    I want this! But I won't get it. We have a little one running around and I can see what would happen some early morning around 4am...

    "Mommy, Daddy... I had a bad dream!"

    "Exit the room or there will be... trouble!" (fires warning shots, 1/4 payload)

    "AAAAARGGGGHHH!!!!! A MONSTER!!!!!" (flees, heavily pelted by nerf discs)

    "You were warned! Have a good day and stay out of... trouble."

    "ZZzzzzZZZzzZZZZZzzzZZZ" (mom & dad (in unison))

    "Waaaaaaahhhhhh" (cries to sleep)

    On second thought... that could make for some interesting Skinner experiments where we actually get to sleep for a whole night! Although the little one might not get to sleep at all, living in fear of the menacing turret monster. Hey maybe this could breed a new form of learned Tourette's Syndrome?? I mean what else is going to happen after being pelted by a nerf turret living in your parent's room for your whole childhood, until all you can do is swear randomly. (all the moderators with Tourette's are going to love this comment... can you imagine their reaction??? At least they won't be able to mod this down -- for a while)

  • Lame (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pmbuko ( 162438 ) <pmbuko AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:20PM (#10768385) Homepage
    All you have to do is train your dog to sit/stay obediently, then get him to take the shots for you until the ammo runs out. You're free to pillage the room unmolested after that.

  • At least make it a little (more) useful: (Score:4, Funny)

    by Gentoo Fan ( 643403 ) on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:20PM (#10768387) Homepage
    Have it push around a vacuum cleaner while it's on patrol.

  • I've had one of these for a while... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rude Turnip ( 49495 ) <valuation.gmail@com> on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:20PM (#10768388)
    I have an earlier model. The biggest change is that instead of shooting discs, it howls and then poops on the carpet.

  • Too cool... (Score:3, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:21PM (#10768405) Homepage Journal

    I sent that link to my gf. She has 3 cats, 2 young ones which torment an older one. The old one stays in its room most of the time while the 2 others come in to play mean. I suggested she puts one of these at the entrance to that cat's room to keep the bad ones out.

    ...and I want one just because it's cool :)
    • That'll work fine and dandy until the old cat decides to leave the room, only to get awakened by all of the discs flying at his ass!

  • Overreaction. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mr_spatula ( 126119 ) on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:22PM (#10768414)
    This isn't impressive.

    If it said anything about actually TRACKING the target, I'd be impressed.

    As it is, it appears to be little more than a light sensor attatched to a rapid-fire nerf gun. i.e. Dumb-fire, no aiming.

    If it says otherwise, I'd love to know... but I saw nothing to indicate that.
    • As it is, it appears to be little more than a light sensor attatched to a rapid-fire nerf gun. i.e. Dumb-fire, no aiming.

      These are still quite fun. You can buy the pressure-hose equivalent from hardware stores to keep raccoons/cats/etc. away from your garbage, flower garden, or whatever.

      I was quite impressed when I saw one of these, though in hindsight it's just a combination of two widely-available existing devices (automatic sprinkler and motion-sensor light). Impressively elegant.

    • Re:Overreaction. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Mysticalfruit ( 533341 )
      Check this out. It uses a camera to track its targets. http://jpbrown.i8.com/aegis.html [i8.com]

    • Re:Overreaction. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Stone316 ( 629009 ) on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @04:38PM (#10769191) Journal
      Jeez, come on.. it only costs 40 bucks... For the system most of us geeks would like to have it would be:

      1. cost about 500 bucks.
      2. be lethal or at least be capable of inflicting injury.
      3. Illegal (unless you live in Texas).

  • What about EMP? (Score:5, Funny)

    by DeepFried ( 644194 ) * on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:23PM (#10768422) Homepage
    I was going to get one of these but then realized it wouldnt take long for wife wife to figure out how to disable it with an EMP grenade.

  • Defending my own room... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:23PM (#10768424)
    ....wouldn't be as fun as liberating my sister's room. I want a unilateral robot room liberator/democracy imposer.

  • I got to get one for the cubicle (Score:3, Funny)

    by broothal ( 186066 ) <christian@fabel.dk> on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:23PM (#10768426) Homepage Journal
    The boss will never sneak in on me again, catching me watching pr0n during work hours.

  • I would get it just to mess with my cat (Score:3, Funny)

    by drgonzo59 ( 747139 ) on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:24PM (#10768437)
    When chasing laser pointer beams just gets too boring for him. It will certainly keep him out of the kitchen.

  • It's Team Fortress Classic/TF1.5 all over again.

    Ahhhh, the memories.

  • Err.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by carlmenezes ( 204187 ) on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:25PM (#10768450) Homepage
    Quote from the customer reviews:

    "Bedroom? Stuck it in me garden, and that pesky cat ain't come round no more!"

    Phil, Harrogate

    So now Phil doesn't have a cat in his garden, but he has to search in the bushes for the bullets and he likes that :)

    Amazing.

    • Chasing cats away, true story (Score:5, Interesting)

      by 3770 ( 560838 ) on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:46PM (#10768660) Homepage
      So,

      My parents had a flower bed that the neighbourhood cats used as their litter box.

      Dad got fed up with that and built a little contraption.

      He rigged up a booby trap with a wire and a clothes peg. When the cats tripped the wire the clothes peg pulled off and broke a circuit with a battery and one of those old style magnesium flashes that one used to have for cameras in the 70s.

      So the cats would walk in there at night, with pupils dilated to the size of grapes and preparing to do their business.

      And trip the wire and.... *flash*!!!

      The wire got tripped a few times. Once per cat in the area I would presume. And then never again.

  • Pointless (Score:3, Funny)

    by Prince Vegeta SSJ4 ( 718736 ) on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:25PM (#10768451)
    You can also program it to shoot in 'warning shot mode' where it will fire off a 1/4 of its payload, 'ambush mode' will fire off half the magazine, or 'assault mode' when it will empty it's breach completely at the unsuspecting intruder.

    Why all the bloat? Just give me Assault Mode!

    Can you imagine an office full of these things. Hundreds of cubicles flinging nerf discs everywhere. That is until someone figures out how to use AOL CD's as ordinance.

  • I want one (Score:3, Insightful)

    by RealProgrammer ( 723725 ) on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:26PM (#10768461) Homepage Journal

    ...that can really persuade people to go away [slashdot.org].

  • So what's unclear, but probable, is that the thing just sits pointing in one direction (presumably at the door), and just fires when the motion detector is triggered.

    But what would be *awesome* is if the thing actually tracked the motion of the target. Although this kind of image processing/sensor power is not likely to be so affordable.

    Maybe a 5-quadrant motion detector would work pretty sweet. Although it might be pretty slow.

    Muerte
    • CMUcam does it in hardware.

      It costs about $200 for the two-servo model, $109 for the 1-servo.

    • Re:Target tracking? (Score:5, Funny)

      by pclminion ( 145572 ) on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:53PM (#10768716)
      Maybe a 5-quadrant motion detector would work pretty sweet. Although it might be pretty slow.

      I can't quite put my finger on it, but something seems odd about the term "5-quadrant."

      • Well, sure. "Quad" from quadrant means 4, and i said "5 quadrant". But allow me to explain.

        Take a four quadrant photodiode and make the center region be a circular fifth detector. Like a pie in four slices with a cookie in the middle. The four arc shapes are used to initiate tracking movement, and the center indicates a lock.

        From dictionary.com:

        quadrant n.

        1. Mathematics.
        1. A circular arc of 90&#176;; one fourth of the circumference of a circle.
        2. The plane area bounded by such an arc

    • Logitech sells a Pan-Tilt-Zoom version of their quickcam with motion tracking (they call it face-tracking). It shouldnt be too hard to marry the two together I wouldnt think.

  • Yet more Doom 3 (Score:3, Funny)

    by CharAznable ( 702598 ) on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:32PM (#10768538)
    This, combined with the teleportation research we read about the other day, can only convice me that we will soon be overrun by zombies, imps and cacodemons, and that only sentry robots will protect us!

    • Would a motion detector actually detect a teleport? Somehow I don't think the el-cheapo X10 Hawkeyes I use in my hallway would- they seem to have problems actually detecting human beings walking down the hallway, let alone something that pops in without movement.
      • Video motion detectors work on the principle of change - usually fast change. When enough pixels change levels above a threshold within a few frames, movement is assumed. So a teleport would show up glaringly. Now if the computer's trying to determine vector, it'd have trouble.
  • Does anyone know if the turrent rotates as it fires or does it always fire in the same direction?

    Not that it really matters; the last time I checked, getting hit by a little foam disk wasn't much of a deterrent...

  • All Fun Now but... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Laoping ( 398603 ) on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @03:33PM (#10768546)
    What happens when the super intelligent monkeys get their hands on these? Seriously people, we can defeat the monkeys and we can defeat the robots, but not at the same time!!!!!
  • New Scientist is currently running a competition in association with Firebox.com.

    Is it just co-incidence that the Blast Match fire starter (a particularly useless item of "survival" gear, at least here in the UK) which is number 8 in the NS gift guide hi-tech list, is available from Firebox? Ditto the Powerball.

  • Looks like their server zigged when it should have zagged.

  • Cameron's Vision... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by vudufixit ( 581911 )
    Freeze the scene in which Cpl. Hicks sets up one of the Sentry guns with an amber-screened laptop, and you'll get an idea of James Cameron's fanatical attention to (convincing) detail - the sentry guns have all sort of settings for "Interrogation modes" "IFF (identify friend or foe)", and an expected target profile, "Soft, Hard, semi-hard." Very cool stuff, but the theatrical cut didn't suffer too badly without that and other scenes. Two of my favorite films, Die Hard and Aliens were long (2.25 hrs ap
  • A few years ago, there were a couple of similar (but non-shooting) toys based on two characters from "A Bug's Life". Maybe 10" tall, motion sensor, prerecorded sayings, varying threat levels. Hang on the wall or sit on the shelf.

    The ant was pretty friendly, but the cricket would evidently get pretty nasty if you stayed in the area.
    "Hey, what are you doing in here"
    "GET OUT!"

    Hacking a foam shooter into one of these would be pretty easy.

  • "Please vacate the room. You have 15 seconds to comply."
  • I really need one outside my office door to keep the boss from cutting into my quality time reading slashdot

  • now (Score:2, Funny)

    by budhaboy ( 717823 )
    if it actually aimed the disk, then I'd think about it... mostly to keep my year old son in line.
  • Any child, or anyone who saw the director's cut of Aliens and dreamed of owning one of those automated sentries.

    Yeah, because they worked out really well in the films...

    ... kidding. Actually, if memory serves, the only reason the sentries "failed" was because they ran out of ammo.

    • Re:Yeah... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Big_Breaker ( 190457 )
      That is correct. In the director's cut the Marines (+ Ripley and Burk) watch nervously as the sentry's ammo ran down. The aliens stop attacking the sentries just as their ammo was nearly exhausted. Instead they breach the perimeter through the ductwork and come down from the ceiling. In the original version the Aliens don't confront any sentry guns and just find the ductwork as a way arround a series of welded doors.
    • Actually, they failed not because they ran out of ammo, but because the aliens lost so many on the "easy" route that they found an alternate path through the ceilings.

      The gun was in the red zone for remaining ammo, though.

      Solution: More ammo, and smaller ventilation ducts.

  • Auto Targeting (Score:2, Insightful)

    by derrickh ( 157646 )
    It shouldn't be too hard to get something that 'looks' like it's tracking an intruder. Stick 4 motion sensors on the front with a narrow beam and have a motor turn the turret to whichever sensor was tripped. It probably couldnt handle tracking a horde of aliens but it should be enough to convince a little brother to fear it.

    D

  • You can make one too, off the shelf (Score:3, Informative)

    by Chairboy ( 88841 ) on Tuesday November 09, 2004 @04:00PM (#10768779) Homepage
    It's easy to make using off the shelf components, and you can build one that will actually track the objects.

    Check out the CMUCAM: CMUcam vision sensors [cmu.edu].

    It can be hooked to servos and automatically track objects, plus the CMUcam2 can control multiple servos, so you could have it be a sentry without having to do any wacky wiring or microprocessing.

  • when you read the title as "Automated Sexy Robots"

    "They know what you wan't and will do it within a tolerance of 1 micron."

    How I miss futurama.
  • Maybe this can help train dogs to stay off furniture, even when the humans aren't around.
  • Reminds me of the turrets in Half-Life. Actually this could be a great way to defend my computer space for the week after Half-Life 2 is out. I wouldn't have to stop playing, or even say "get out of here". Better gaming through robotics!
  • It is illegal (at least in the US) to "booby trap" your residence. For example, a shotgun with a string around the trigger, running through a pulley to the front doorknob.

    Suppose this device fired a disc into an intruder's eye, and did some sort of damage. I wonder if that intruder could successfully bring a case against the property owner for booby trapping his/her property.

    • Probably not. Generally, you can use force to defend your home. You just can't use unreasonable force.

      Here, the intruder would have to show that the use of the sentrybot constituted an unreasonable risk of physical harm. Frankly, I doubt any jury in the country would go for that, especially when the person who's suing was illegally breaking into the protected home.

      --AC
  • If I remember in Aliens the automated sentries had dual 50 caliber guns mounted on them. I've always wanted a few of these along with neet little signs showing a guy being shot a killed because you never know if the person wandering onto your property can read. *lol*

    Nick Powers
  • What kind of geek crowd is this!?!?!

    The movie [imdb.com] opens with an armed home defense robot that went berserk.

    • I don't think it was a robot designed for home security. It was just a little helper bot (a HERO [robotswanted.com] if I recall correctly) that wigged out and picked up a gun and started shooting.

      My favorite part of that movie was how "futuristic" the cop cars looked because they were Ford Tauruses instead of blocky Chevy Caprices. Oh, and Cynthia Rhodes was an early crush for me.

  • To the day we won't need the poor.
  • Am I the only one to whom the image of that thing gives flashbacks to some of the enemy vehicles from the Captain Power series/toys?
  • First, this is F****** COOL!

    I don't care if it doesn't track, for the price, it's pretty damned neat.

    Second, I was rolling from all the funny as hell comments on this topic.

    Combine the comments and get a squirrel destroying monster robot that sounds like RoboCop roaming your house and destroying anything that moves.

    What a mental picture!
  • Did anyone else notice that this thing doesn't actually aim itself? Yeah... so it has a motion detector. It's stationary. All you have to do is walk around it while the "warning" is going off (not that I'm afraid of foam discs)...
  • can they be armed with a death ray and a bathroom plunger?
  • Purchase a roomba. Remove the roomba's top cover and drill a few holes. Now mount your sentury robot to the cover and put everything back in place. Set everything to automatic and watch your household fall into chaos! To take on the world, increase number of room-turies, and mount small wireles cameras on each unit so you dont even have to leave the living room to enjoy.

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