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Butlers, lunar rovers, snakes and airboats: the best of Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute
How was your week? We got to spend a couple of days trekking around the Carnegie Mellon campus in Pittsburgh, PA to check out some of the latest projects from the school's world renowned Robotics Institute -- a trip that culminated with the bi-annual induction ceremony from the CMU-sponsored Robot Hall of Fame. Given all the craziness of the past seven days, you might have missed some of the awesomeness, but fear not, we've got it all for you here in one handy place -- plus a couple of videos from the trip that we haven't shown you yet. Join us after the break to catch up.
Robotic butlers, bartenders and receptionists at Carnegie Mellon (video)
At school like Carnegie Mellon, it sort of figures that you'd find robots just about everywhere, performing the sorts of tasks we've traditionally left to us more fleshy types. In the two days we've spent on campus, we've seen 'bots do just about everything -- some far more autonomously than others. Take Roboceptionist -- the robotic secretary was one of the first intelligent beings we encountered upon arriving on the premises, artificial or otherwise, greeting us from a wooden kiosk near the entrance to Newell-Simon Hall. The receptionist's creators named him Marion "Tank" Lefleur -- but don't call him "Marion." It's really a sort of a "Boy Named Sue" scenario, and calling him by his birth name is a surefire way of getting on his bad side. When he's not getting irritated, Tank's tasked with helping you find things on campus -- people, halls, food -- by way of a small keyboard. He's got a surprisingly complex backstory that informs his answers. Ask him how his mom and dad are doing and you're bound to get some fairly bizarre responses -- same with more straight forward questions about finding a place to eat on campus, for that matter.%Gallery-169179%
Intel shows off 'HERB' the robotic butler, the future is unimpressed
So, you're glamping out on Mars, and of course you need someone to buttle you as you relax within your well appointed, synthetic diamond-reinforced space tent; who better than a robotic butler? Good thing we've come a long way in the last 100 years or so, can you believe that early 21st century humans had to get by with this bot built by Intel named "HERB," who could barely manage to drop an empty into the recycling bin? Sure, he wasn't totally worthless, he could sort dishes and put them in the dishwasher (edible flatware wasn't the norm back then), and managed a vague approximation of speech synthesis (this was before Google blew the lid off the whole artificial voice problem in the 2030s), but it's hard to call any of these capabilities truly useful to any modern family. Check out the video after the break, and there's no need to don your 4D glasses: this holovid is flat and scentless.
Time Is Money: Frost Lotus prices and farming
Time Is Money, so I won't keep you long. Frost Lotus is a component of raiding flasks, and it is gathered as a very rare chance from regular herb nodes, as well as Frost Lotus nodes that appear in Wintergrasp and Freya's room in Ulduar. The price of Frost Lotus has skyrocketed since patch 3.3 on many servers. This is partly due to the large increase in demand for flasks that the new content brought us, but I believe partly because of a reduction in supply. The supply of Frost Lotus is and always has been low, however as I mentioned in my last column, there are ways to farm it. The most popular one was to get saved to an Ulduar raid ID where Freya's Elders (Brightleaf, Ironbranch, and Stonebark) have been killed, but Freya herself hasn't, allowing the herb nodes to respawn. Getting the nodes to respawn simply requires a "soft reset" of the instance, which means nobody zones in for 30 minutes.
