The Robots I Love (and can afford) UPDATED

70+ years of robots in science fiction have failed to yield anything
similar in real life. Our movies and books feature human companions,
even substitutes. The robots we have today still resemble machinery
and are best suited to completing singular tasks. Even in the field of
academic robotics we see robo snakes for inspecting pipes and other
non humanlike robots.  It is clear that people won't be "copied" or
replaced anytime soon.

But we do have simple robots that can do work for us which ease our
burdens. These are the robots that are taking hold, filing niches and
being built by the millions. Their simplicity and mass market
application make them affordable.

Our first robot (or the first one I recognized) was the cruise control in our car, able to maintain a constant speed while driving, suitable for ensuring that long road
trips stay on pace and that flatland travel uses fuel efficiently.

Our second robot was the motion sensor light which would faithfully
watch to see if light was required, and then turn it on, ensuring the safety
of people and even the occasional cat.

Our next robots were a pair of dehumidistat that could detect when air
In our house was too moist and activate a fan to vent the humid air. This allowed
fans to run automatically ensuring the health of our house's air
without running too long. This balance helps prevent venting too much
heated air during the winter. So they help us be healthy and save us money.

Perhaps the most obvious robot we have is Roomba a vacuuming robot
whose enthusiasm for vacuuming more than makes up for its wandering
approach. Roomba may only get 85% of the dirt but that is
85% I didn't have to clean, and it isn't always the same 85%, meaning
that repeated runs achieve a higher rate of cleaning. Apart from the
cleaning, Roomba puts itself away when it is finished and recharges
itself so it is ready to clean at the next scheduled time.

Maybe The most primitive of robots is the alarm clock which counts the time
And could wake you up at a predetermined time. Something that is difficult to do yourself while sleeping.

The washing machine is a robot with muscle, vigorously scrubbing our
clothes, rinsing the soap out and then squeezing out most of the water
by spinning. Along with its partner the dryer, these two machines
process many pounds of clothing each week, making our lives cleaner
and healthier.  I regret that in over 50 years we have not observed a
variation on these machines which would allow the dryer to eject its
load into a waiting basket in order to receive a load which would in
turn be ejected by the washer.   I think we have an opportunity here
that we are missing. A laundry processing system where the clothes
enter the chute upstairs and appear clean and dry in the basket
downstairs.


The dishwasher saves us countless hours by washing and rinsing and
drying dishes we would otherwise have to pile and wash by hand. There
is still the trick of getting the dishes in and out but overall it
saves human labour.

The automated lawn sprinkler system can obey restrictive watering
restrictions while keeping your lswn green and in some cases by
monitoring rainfall. Ranging from $100 these systems allow you to
remain on schedule (or in bed) without performing mundane
"hose management".

Thermostats - central or "zone" keep the temperature "right". This
May not be apparent until you try a wood fire and feel the room heat and then
cool beyond the range of comfort.

These robots take an incremental approach to serving us, often unnoticed and understated. These are the robots I love (and can afford)..

Update; lights lights lights lights. 

 Home Depot sells a $30 Leviton light switch that has an astronomical calendar in it. In a nutshell it can accept latitude longitude, time zone and more in order to accurately determine when the sun will rise and set so that your outdoor lights turn on a few minutes before sunset and turn themselves off again when the sun rises. 

And on a slightly sheepish note when wiring the lighting for my garage I didn't put the light switch within reach of the door.  So I installed a $20 motion sensing light switch that "sees" when I am entering the garage and switches on the lights. 

Ok, if you are like me you detest banging your shins in the dark. So I took a radio shack sound activated wall plugin, attached a string of white LED Xmas lights and threw them under te bed. Now when milt feet hit the floor in the morning I am greeted by the soft bite glow from under the bed illuminating my path safely. 

And finally when I get up in the dark winter months, I get dressed in the dark so I don't wake my wife with the light. IKEA sells a wonderfull $18 motion sensing light I have mounted in the closet above the door. When the door opens the small led light comes on for 15 seconds which is just long enough for me to differentiate the different shirt colours in the closet so I make a better choice!

Cheers I hope that helps someone. 

More Real-Time Traffic from Google with Google Maps

You  probably know by now that I'm a fan of Google Maps Traffic, and I've been putting it to the test every day with the carpool.  I think it is nothing short of amazing that by merging 2 apps data (latitude and google maps), Google has effectively provided basic coast to coast traffic for the US and some major cities in Canada, some major cities in China, most of the UK, France and Finland.  Check these screenshots out;

Now there is a social good that Google is offering to me.  I think its great.  Certainly the price seems lower than the alternative methods of providing this (roadside radar infrastructure coast to coast / in-road induction loops measuring traffic speed)  Google gets a ton of good will from people like me.

Predict traffic before it happens

A little while back, Google Maps for desktop started sharing historic average traffic information.  You can access this by clicking on traffic, and then click on "change". (no, sorry it doesn't do what it says, it doesn't actually "change" the traffic). Then play with the controls to see what traffic will probably be like.

Below you can see the variation in traffic approaching the Port Mann Bridge in Surrey BC that occurs at the same time on a Monday, and on a Friday.

I'm not sure if they are doing it yet, but the potential for this technology becomes apparent as you consider routing people through an urban center with a known departure time, known historic traffic on alternate routes, at different points of time throughout that journey.  So if someone were driving from Vancouver BC to Portland Oregon, perhaps with a 7 am departure they'd get routed via the I-405, but if they left at 8am perhaps they'd get routed via the I-5 instead because an hour later, they'd save 10 minutes on the I-5 vs the 405.  In the right hands, this technology has potential uses in focusing infrastructure improvements as well.  I mean really, getting that old rubber hose stretched across the road for a week and then going and collecting the counter at the end of the week only to get a total axle count?  Come on.  Traffic speed in 15 minute increments whenever there was enough traffic to count?  Fantastic.

Avoiding Congestion with Google Maps Mobile Traffic Information

Google Mobile Traffic has saved us from a couple really bad traffic Jams.  One case in Langley essentially had the freeway backed up for 6 miles, but because of the heads up Google Maps Mobile provided, we saw the yellow heading into the solid red that stretched down the freeway.  We got off and detoured through some rural routes until we could return to the freeway 8 miles later.  It was interesting to note that as we detoured around the congestion, we could see the congestion starting to shrink in size, and we could also see that it was moving Eastward down the freeway.  So by the time we got back to the freeway, the front of that congestion was just starting to hit that entrance.  With 4 people in our carpool (which is saving us $1000s per year) if we can avoid sitting in traffic for an hour (like the example above) that is saving us 4 hours that we'd rather spend at home with our families.  Thanks Google!  If you need a carpool to test out fancy Android GPS Navigation prototypes we're your carpool, call me baby, we'll hook you up with some tech savvy feedback and real-world testing.

Using Google Maps Mobile safely while commuting

Generally we frown on the drive using Google Mobile applications unless it is during a red light.  Passengers can of course use Google Mobile safely throughout the journey.  We have a bit of a ritual, when we leave for work, and leave work at the end of the day, we load up a google maps mobile view of our entire route, and assess the colour.  All Green,   All Green with some Yellow, or Red somewhere on our route.  If its anything but red, we stick to the plan following our normal (highly optimized) routes.  It it's red, we turn on the 24 hour traffic radio station to get a "second opinion".

Accuracy?
For the cost ($0.00) its really quite good.  Much better than the lack of realtime traffic we've had before.  We understand that Google requires a certain number of drivers to be travelling with GPS down a road, before they will publish the traffic speed. (which explains the spots on the commute that are missing traffic.)  Sometimes we have seen Google drawing the traffic on the map right behind us as we drive.  We don't trust it 100% because of a few things we've observed.  Sometimes we see Red on the map, but when we get there things seem slow but not bad enough for "red"...  Other times it has been very accurate, as we drive in to the "yellow" from the "green" we see the traffic slow and become congested...

Since the data for the real-time traffic comes from GPS in mobile phones that are running Google location service "latitude"...  You can improve the quality of traffic information, by enabling latitude.  Google knows where your phone is, and so do the friends you share your location with.  (I share with only 5 people)  I really don't mind Google seeing my route back and forth to work.  I turn Latitude off sometimes, and turn it back on in traffic.

Feature Request:
Google, it would be great if we could have Latitude turn off and on either based on Location (always turn off when I drive home, always turn on when I get on the Freeway)  or based on time.  Share location between 7AM and 5PM.

We have observed a strange behaviour on google maps mobile traffic.  Sometimes one zoom level of the map with traffic will show a road as green, while a different zoom level of the same section of map with traffic shows as  yellow.  Presumably the act of zooming in and out on the map doesn't actually speed up or slow down traffic. (If it does, we've accidentally invented something much more powerful here).  So there is apparently some lag issue there.  Is it a bug? or are we just hitting different copies of the data on different servers as the different zoom levels are updated on a slightly different schedule?  Sometimes its actually wrong, (really wrong).  But generally Google Mobile Maps Traffic gives a reasonable overview of traffic conditions.

Also interesting, I've noticed on the desktop version of Google maps, that I can see more or less traffic detail depending on which browser I use.  See below;

Above in Chrome, no red traffic below the "Burnaby" label, also no traffic North of the river North of the Knight St. bridge. (but below in Firefox I see these 2 details).  So with both pages loaded at the same time, why is Google serving different traffic data?  Am I missing something here?

Above in IE we see green traffic North/South on 176th street, but below in Firefox, we don't see that traffic.

Google Mobile does offer a bit of online help to explain traffic here;
http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=61455

Traffic color descriptions
If available in your area, real-time traffic conditions will be displayed over the highway as color coded lines. Each color represents how fast the traffic is moving:

• Green: more than 50 miles per hour
• Yellow: 25 - 50 miles per hour
• Red: less than 25 miles per hour
• Gray: no data currently available

I wonder if these legend numbers are truly accurate.  Often there are smaller roads that are flowing smoothly, represented in green which have posted speed limits of 60KM/h or 37MPH (as you can see from the above legend, that should be Yellow because it is below 50MPH.  So my point is that Google maps is putting reasonable colours on the maps, but the reality doesn't reflect these numbers in the legend.   I suspect that Google is using algorithms to ignore / accommodate traffic lights of normal duration (1 min?), and also that with the historic average speed data they are gathering, that we will see the "green" / "yellow" / "red" coding for the traffic reflect how the traffic deviates from the norm as well as matching an absolute speed.  (of course absolute speeds in a legend are simpler to explain).

Availability of real-time traffic

Real-time traffic data is available in major cities in the United States, France, Britain, Australia, and Canada, with new cities and new countries frequently added. To see if real-time traffic is available in your area, simple focus the map on your area of interest and look for the "Traffic" button in the upper-right corner of your screen. Note that traffic conditions are shown based on data availability -- if we don't have enough data to calculate accurate traffic speeds for a road, then we won't show traffic conditions for that road. This is the reason why you may see more real-time traffic results at certain times of the day. 

New "Colour" for Google Maps Traffic (via gpslodge)

Google Maps has recently updated its traffic flow representations to show not only the regular Red-Yellow-Green format, but a Red/Black hashing that shows super slow traffic at <10 MPH.
Can I get that on my GPS? Red goes up to 25MPH, and there is a huge difference between essentially stop and go at under 10 MPH and putting along at 25 MPH when you need to get home. One, I might try to plow through if it's short; the other I would avoid like the plague.
(from http://www.gpslodge.com/archives/019842.php)

Prediction:  Google is going to be able to effectively identify where roads are, and how they connect.  Google is going to be able to see which roads only flow in one direction, which lanes are alternating "counterflow" lanes which switch direction during rush hour.  They aren't going to have to wait for Tele-Atlas or others to "update" their maps, or "correct" their errors.  The GPS in your phone is going to map the roads, and don't worry about the people walking with a cell...  generally people don't walk or hike at 50km/h etc so with some intelligently designed algorithms, Google will know before the planners release the updates.)  If  you've ever noticed problems with Google maps such as the $800,000,000 "Golden Ears Bridge" missing in the Lower mainland of BC, and tried to report them, you will have been sent to the map providers website to submit an "issue" and well supposedly something happens after that...

Feature request:
Google for the desktop edition, please give me a "refresh" button.  If I'm watching traffic, but I'm not moving the map, from a normal browser I'd hit F5, but when I try that with maps.google.com I end up looking at a map of North America. Effectively I get to start all over which is irritating.  Hitting "back" at that point doesn't help because I was already in the correct location in the browser history.  Ajax is getting there...

Other features noted
One nice feature I've noticed is that google maps mobile seems to have an intelligent "timeout" on map data.  This means that 8 hours after your morning commute, you'll likely have to tell Google Maps on your Blackberry to "show traffic".  I don't mind because if I didn't want traffic I'd be waiting for that to load, and I'd rather "ask" for a feature to run on my phone, than have that feature just assume it should present itself (like a certain operating system developed near Seattle does).

In Google Maps for desktop you can't save a link to a map with traffic data.  If you turn off the traffic information, then Google will happily provide you with a link. (the link button is at the top right of the map.  try it).  I'm wondering if this is to help Google control who could re-sell that data via approved API access or whether there is just complexity to the Ajax magic being pulled off.  My bet is it's to assure appropriate control.

So all in all, the Traffic Information service provided by Google through Google Maps is phenomenal.  Well worth the price of admission. Very usable and something that is effectively mapping the developed world automatically.  Very smart guys... Very smart...  Thanks Google.

Cheers,
Greg.