Hello Everyone, I hope you’re all doing well.
I recently had an idea for a project and I decided that I would ask the lovely members on this forum for their thoughts and opinions on the matter, seeing as you would be part of the core demographic, hahaha. As of the time of writing this post, the idea is at best an ambitious dream and has barely progressed beyond the stage of being a concept, but in essence it is as follows.
Project Venture is an online platform that allows individuals from around the globe to control a robotic system (quadruped/hexapod) in real-time and view their surroundings through a FPV with the robot’s built-in camera. A typical ‘area’ would contain about 10 robots in total which are all controlled by different, random users. The actual “environment” would be made up to look like a production set (be it a rainforest theme, or desert, etc.) and the user can explore the environment, complete tasks and interact with other users and their ‘avatars’. The robots themselves would be quite small - below 200mm in all axes.
As for use and robot assignment: there would be a 10-15 minute operation period where the user is free to do whatever they want, after which they’re disconnected and someone else gets a chance to try; and robots would be allocated randomly in the interest of fairness.
I suppose you could call is a small-scale Jurassic Park where you get to be the T-Rex chasing Jeff Goldblum, hahaha.
I had a few minutes spare so I just threw together a quick mock-up image to add some visuals amongst the sea of text.
Any thoughts would be appreciated - it’s just an idea (perhaps even a very silly one) but I felt it was worth putting out there, and seeing the response(s).
I look forward to the feedback. Have a lovely day!
Kind Regards,
A.K
Interesting concept. A few random thoughts in no particular order:
]It’s incredibly rare to find walking code which includes terrain adaptation, meaning the surface on which the robots walk will need to be completely flat - not even small hills. /:m]
]Walking robots are always fighting against gravity, so their batteries do not last very long; you can expect around 20 minutes of operation between charges. There are no docking stations on the market for legged robots (yet)/:m]
]You’ll need to deal with / prepare for childish behavior where people’s primary objectives are to destroy the robots and each other however they can. This will be really expensive for you./:m]
]The software side is certainly possible, and you could even overlay graphics based on robot status./:m]
]Not sure how many people would pay for the experience, so there would be very little to no return on investment, and there would be constant support for people who experience issues (no camera feed, a servo not responding, battery died etc.)/:m]
Something a bit more financially possible and attractive might be to use robot arms to collaborate on tasks. This means they can be plugged in at all times (no battery changes), can be programmed so they cannot touch each other (via a “central”) or damage themselves. Should you be successful, you might contact interactive science centers to propose the idea of having users control the arms, and compete against random people online.
Should you prefer something mobile, a robot with a docking station is a “must”, as well as a long battery life, and a fairly robust frame. A (hacked) circular robot vacuum is what comes to mind, so it would just be a question of finding a really fun game strategy. Placing a camera and a projector on the ceiling, facing downward would offer many, many possibilities. Combining arms with these would allow for even more advanced play (use the arm to place objects in buckets on top of the mobile robots, move to a location and another arm removes it… )
Thank you for the detailed insights - I appreciate it very much!
Yes, I also had some concerns about users getting into their own little robo-battles and potentially destroying the each other (which is something the child in me finds slightly appealing but also highly worrying, hahaha). I do love the idea of using robot arms to complete ‘team’ exercises - sounds brilliant.
I have a few ideas about “dynamically” (or at least autonomously) charging multi-legged systems which is actually part of a much larger project I’m currently in the initial stages of working on (the mysterious Project Artemis which will be posted on the forum once a design has been finalised, haha).
Project Venture is still very much open-ended (I hope to have some time available to dedicate to it properly) and thank you again for the reply - always nice to get some feedback! 
Kind Regards,
A.K
