Terrible title. A leaf blower does that. The abstract isn't great either. Can someone describe the actual contribution of this paper in a sentence?
EnigmaFlare 12 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure what the contribution is since it seems like just engineering, but pretty cool low-tech control system engineering. They made a thing that can automatically push an object along an arbitrary path on the ground by pointing (in 2 axes) a jet of air at the ground behind it, controlled by feedback of the object's position. It doesn't seem to say anything about how the feedback was done so I guess machine vision which is its whole own problem.
altairprime 10 hours ago [-]
If I read this right - They can also change to pulling objects towards the leafblower by varying its orientation without its position.
krisoft 6 hours ago [-]
> A leaf blower does that.
A leaf blower in the hand of a human can do that. Without the human pointing the leafblower just right the objects will go in random directions.
They made a controller to control their “leafblower”[1] just right so the objects end up in where they want them to, and then they described how well it works on various tasks. This automated controller is their contribution.
1: They didn’t use an actual leafblower but a nozzle attached to an air compressor.
KineticLensman 3 hours ago [-]
> A leaf blower in the hand of a human can do that.
In twenty years of leaf blowing I have never managed to move a small light object in a 'S' shape as per [0] or drag a hand saw as per [1]
It would be great if this could be adapted to provide automated "spotting" for gymnasts by detecting when they were about to fall, safely stopping them from spinning mid-air, and slowly lowering them to the ground, all with jets of air.
oezi 2 days ago [-]
Is there a link to the video mentioned to be in the supporting materials?
Animats 2 days ago [-]
Download the supporting materials and play the .mp4 files.
kbenson 12 hours ago [-]
What is going on here? This story and these comments are from a day (or a few?) ago but are showing as hours old. Caching?
Arnavion 8 hours ago [-]
HN sometimes revives old submissions and fakes the comment timestamps to pretend that they're recent. I've seen it happen thrice before.
Here too you can see that for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40207449 claims to be posted "seven hours ago" at the time of this comment. But with a tooltip that it was posted on at 2024-04-30T05:11:46, and indeed the same comment on the user's comments page says it was posted "2 days ago" which lines up with that tooltip.
wizardforhire 2 days ago [-]
tldr: tech the tech and use the force… or in other words, move objects in a controlled manner at distance with jets of air.
Rendered at 15:10:16 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
A leaf blower in the hand of a human can do that. Without the human pointing the leafblower just right the objects will go in random directions.
They made a controller to control their “leafblower”[1] just right so the objects end up in where they want them to, and then they described how well it works on various tasks. This automated controller is their contribution.
1: They didn’t use an actual leafblower but a nozzle attached to an air compressor.
In twenty years of leaf blowing I have never managed to move a small light object in a 'S' shape as per [0] or drag a hand saw as per [1]
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aisy.202400174 / aisy202400174-sup-0001-SuppData-S5.mp4
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aisy.202400174 / aisy202400174-sup-0001-SuppData-S8.mp4
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30937892
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33695320
Here too you can see that for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40207449 claims to be posted "seven hours ago" at the time of this comment. But with a tooltip that it was posted on at 2024-04-30T05:11:46, and indeed the same comment on the user's comments page says it was posted "2 days ago" which lines up with that tooltip.