Mini-Cooper robot: Hoax, or no?

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DPDarkPrimus
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Mini-Cooper robot: Hoax, or no?

Post by DPDarkPrimus »

http://www.r50rd.co.uk/research/internal/v2i/engin/

Check the link out.

Seems like a VERY NICE hoax, but then you get to this.
I'm not so sure. I really want to believe this thing's for real, but I
have some serious doubts. Here's the response I got from Colin Mayhew,
the robot's inventor:

Colin Mayhew wrote:

>I can assure you that the Cooper project is a real and
>very tangible one. Your suspicion is perhaps
>understandable because the leaps we've made are rather
>significant compared to the current state of
>commercial AI. As Mr. Clarke wrote in Technology and
>the Future, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is
>indistinguishable from magic." What's important to
>remember in this famous quotation is not that the
>technology becomes magic, but rather that technology
>seems magical only to those who don't understand the
>details or are not knowledgeable of the history of a
>technology's development. It's for that reason that
>I've placed notes online and have included videos from
>different stages of the project. Have you seen videos
>of people interacting with the Kismet robot? That
>robot uses a fairly simple emotional model, yet people
>bond to it and treat it as a 'living' creature! It has
>become something magical from bits of aluminum and
>electrons whizzing inside silicon. Your experiences in
>the research sector I'm sure have shown you how
>disconnected the public can be from the realities of
>technology. There are autonomous machines (be they in
>medicine or oil well drilling) so removed from our
>daily lives that when we finally learn of them, we are
>shocked and amazed---far more so than had we followed
>the gradual steps and wrong turns the engineers made
>developing and finessing the technology. This project
>is real, and it, and the systems I've developed for it
>are going to change the way we live our lives. The
>most recent software revision I've tested on the robot
>has some powerful reasoning capabilities, a large step
>more powerful and versatile than that employed on the
>robot when I recorded the videos you may have seen
>online. They are perhaps powerful enough to seem like
>magic, but both devil and the angel of creativity are
>in the details. Soon enough, these little creatures
>will be animating the robots all around us and making
>our lives safer and more fulfilling.
>
>Regards,
>Colin
>
>
An individual on /. did discover that the site is registered to the same location as a television/commercial angency...


Either way, it's kickass.
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Admiral Valdemar
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Post by Admiral Valdemar »

Mini Cooper = greatness.

Robotic Mini Cooper = more greatness.
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Post by The Albino Raven »

ah, the entertainment of it all, too bad my car can't be like that. :(
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Post by darthdavid »

too bad it's obviously a hoax.
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Post by DPDarkPrimus »

Word has it it's part of a promotion for an upcoming Mini-Cooper Transformer toy.
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Post by Darth Fanboy »

Step One - Mini Cooper

Step Two - Full Sized sedan

Step Three - Oversized, Overgunned, Battle Tank ala Megatron..
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Post by Robert Walper »

:wtf: To say that I'm dubious as to the reality of this "creation" is an understatement. (although fucking cool is also an understatement :D)

The spinning "wheels" at the shoulder of the robot partciularily seems to stretch credibility. Unless I'm mistaken and those wheels spinning serves as some sort of centrifugal force to help balance.

In either case, I'm waiting for the opinion of someone more qualified to determine the reality and practicality of this robot design. Perhaps a mechanical engineer whom we all know? 8)

My guess is this is a promotion for an upcoming movie involving large robots. Mechwarrior or similar kind of project.
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Post by Hobot »

One thing I noticed is that in the link DPDP provided, there are a couple of posts that mention how fake the battery test video looks. However, I cannot load this video, and changing the .htm to a .mpg (which works for all the other videos) results in a 404 error. Can anyone else load this video?

EDIT: I don't know if this means anything or not, but the robot site has a link to the inventor's home page. According to that page, it hasn't been updated since early 1999, but according to Firefox's page info it was last updated two weeks ago.

EDIT (2): I decided to run Dr. Mayhew's site's URL through Internet Archive and surprise, surprise it has no archive of that site.
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Post by SoX »

On the main pic the robot looks CG to me, the lighting doesnt look quite right.
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