快猫短视频

HERE鈥橲 a moral dilemma to mull over this Christmas. You鈥檙e playing with a
model train set, not yours. You鈥檙e bored. What you鈥檇 really like to do is put
one train on a collision course with the other, sit back and watch the disaster
unfold.

But the collision might damage the trains. More worryingly, the owners might
catch you at it. And how would you feel if this were your train set?

Relax. You鈥檙e controlling this railway over the Internet. A live video feed
shows you the trains and a program allows you to pick the destination of each
one. You don鈥檛 know the owners and they don鈥檛 know you but, by making the
website public, they have invited you to play. If they鈥檝e placed two trains on
the same track, that鈥檚 their problem鈥攁nd anyway, you could claim that any
collision was simply an accident.

Welcome to the world of telerobotics, the emerging field of long-distance
remote control. Forget the comparatively primitive kinds of remote control we
use to switch TV channels, say, or steer radio-controlled cars. For
teleroboticists, the vision is far grander.

Their world has been transformed by the convergence of two technologies: the
Internet and robotic machines. It means that one day, schoolchildren could carry
out experiments on the space station while engineers on one side of the planet
fix a broken power generator on the other side.

But this revolution could also change our notions of responsibility and
morality. Punch someone and they鈥檒l punch you back; crash your car into someone
else鈥檚 and you pay to have them fixed. This knowledge keeps the world in a
delicate balance. Change it and who knows what will happen? The dangerous thing
about telerobotics is that cause can be separated from effect.

But don鈥檛 head for the bunkers just yet. As with any emerging technology
there is fun to be had while it matures, and the nature of telerobotics means we
can all play. Want to drive remote controlled cars in the US or control
鈥渞emotebots鈥� in Germany? They鈥檙e all there on the Web (see 鈥淐lick here to
play鈥�). One robot, called ANU, at the Australian National University in Canberra
can be steered through the campus offices. Naturally, the offices are full of
people, conjuring up a scenario rich in potential accidents鈥攁 bruised leg
or a crushed toe, perhaps. Go on, they鈥檒l never know it was you.

Then there is the bot that moves among the snakes in a Brazilian reptile
house. The images send a chill down the spine but so does the possibility that
your instructions to the robot could be crushing a rare and beautiful animal to
death. It might have been a genuine accident this time but try telling that to
the zookeepers. Who would believe you after what you did to those trains?

Of course, the destructive potential of these robots is not quite that easy
to harness, at least not yet. For the most part, telerobots are clumsy and
unreliable, and as for the Web, anyone with a standard domestic Internet
connection knows how well that works. 鈥淭he major challenge is overcoming the
time delay the Internet introduces,鈥� says Roland Siegwart, a teleroboticist at
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

Log on to steer a robot and you鈥檒l see what he means. Your commands take time
to reach the robot and the images take even longer to come back. The return
journey takes at best a second or two and at worst forever. It doesn鈥檛 take much
imagination to foresee the problems this causes.

NASA knows this better than most. In 1996, it sent a rover called Sojourner
to explore the surface of Mars. The robot was given some autonomy, but to
prevent accidents, NASA built in safeguards that made the rover stop and wait
for commands from Earth if, for example, it started to tip over.

What NASA had not anticipated was that the rover would constantly tilt beyond
the fail-safe point and be forced to wait ages for a message from Earth to set
it going again. As a result, it was stuck in an area called the Rock Garden for
weeks.

That鈥檚 not a problem for the latest project from Ken Goldberg, an electrical
engineer at the University of California, Berkeley. He has experimented online
with everything from gardening robots to Ouija boards. Now, for the ultimate
telerobotic experience, he has connected a person carrying a webcam to the
Internet and allows users to control the person鈥檚 movements.

Goldberg says this could revolutionise the traditional school trip. A
鈥渢ele-actor鈥� could travel to the rainforests or the top of a mountain while the
school party decides from the classroom which way to go. Turn a journalist into
a tele-actor, and television news might never be the same again.

Goldberg worries about the moral issues that telerobots raise, so he set out
to test them. In 1996, he set up a telerobot that allowed users to burn holes in
a $100 note, which is a crime in the US. How many users would think twice
about such an anonymous and apparently harmless crime?

But the exercise was more complicated than that. One claim was that the
website was faked. Instead of live images, the suggestion was that users were
seeing a series of carefully selected library pictures.

This issue puts telerobot users in a bit of a pickle. How can they ever know
that their commands are really carried out? And if so, why should they worry
about the consequences? According to Goldberg, this is an insidious problem that
could eat away at the moral fabric of an online society.

Imagine, they say, a website showing live film of a human head in the cross
hairs of a rifle, with a button that controls the trigger. Pressing the button
shows the head blown apart by a bullet. If you pressed the button would you be
guilty of murder, attempted murder or just plain stupidity? Would you even
care?

Thankfully, not everyone wants to spend their surfing time taking potshots at
strangers. So if you aren鈥檛 lucky enough to get a train set this Christmas, no
matter. Just log on and start playing with the online model. And while you鈥檙e
there, be thankful that each train is programmed to move out of harm鈥檚 way
should some idiot try to smash them together.

* * *

Click here to play

The Interactive Model Railroad is at:

The strange world of the remotebots is at:

Drive remote controlled cars at:

Online gardening is at:

Max the robotic dog is at:

The Tele-actor project is at:

Try the Australian toe crusher at:

The Brazilian snakebot is at: