[Robotgroup] OSB Radiant Barrier Rink Boards. Plus, the HERE and NOW for Droids. Re: Drive a Droid proposal

[Bruce Waters]

Oriented Strand Board (OSB) radiant barrier Roof Sheathing 
may be the right stuff for an easy-to-sense, mostly-prefabbed 
rink to lay on a concrete floor.   See:
http://www.gp.com/build/product.aspx?pid=5857

Vern said:
>I'm more concerned with what a 200lb wheeled droid would do to sheets of 
>tin foil the first time it starts stops or turns... rrrrrrrripppp! :P

I suspect the one piece foil is backed with craft paper and 
glued to 7/16 OSB.  This sandwich should make the foil 
resistant to ripping.   Perhaps we should use some R2 wheels
under some platform with appropriate weight to test for stopping, 
starting, and turning durability.   I suspect that the aluminum 
used on these radiant barrier sheathing boards is bare and
conductive but I do not yet know for sure.
    One could use an insulating paint  to cover the foil outside of
the desired rink area.  Buying these sheets already manufactured
should provide good quality control and eliminate a lot of labor
compared to manually gluing down wide ribbons of aluminum foil 
over large areas. We may need some scheme for managing seam 
bumps and for abutting enough sheets to create an area of the 
desired dimensions. 
    I would still recommend using ropes to do crowd control.   All 
droids should be limited to travel within an area well back from the 
ropes.  I also think that the administration of the display can benefit 
greatly from the fact that the "guest operator" normally will 
experience automatic recovery from an out-of-bounds excursion.  
IMHO, a physical, visible rink is far superior in both human factors 
and safety to invisible or virtual boundaries like dog wires, wheel 
encoder calculations, GPS, radio location, laser perimeters,...
     I also recommend that a remote "kill switch" be viewed as a
required "allowed to run NOW" permission.   If the droid gets no 
signal or a corrupt signal it should interpret that as a "kill".   Only 
if a droid is flawlessly receiving the "allowed to run" communication 
should it ever move.   The display administrator should have to 
maintain pressure on the unique "allowed to run" control or 
everything should shut down.  Pressure on the "allowed to run" 
control is the administrator's continuous judgment that everything 
is OK for the droid to run NOW.   If the administrator loses 
consciousness the control should stop sending "allowed to run"
since the administrator can no longer judge NOW.
     Similarly, the detect-the-rink is a continuous judgement that
it is OK to run HERE.   In this case, the HERE is geographically
predetermined by the location of the accessible foil.   
      A 200 pound droid controlled by a "guest operator" must 
constantly know for certain if it is OK to run HERE and NOW
or it runs a significant risk of violating Asimov's laws.
     
Bruce Waters