Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Robotics/Archive 1

Archive 1

Archive 2

THIS PROJECT IS EVIL AND SHOULD BE SHUT DOWN!

This user supports Humans United Against Robots.

☯  Zenwhat (talk) 02:54, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the nice illustration of the point I'm about to make, Zenwhat :) There's an article in the current SciAm about how Hitachi is moving forward on reducing the size of RFID chips. I was dismayed to see that 90% of the online reaction, even at tech-friendly sites like Engadget, had the flavor of Zenwhat's userbox. (The relevance to robotics is that cheap, tiny RFID chips can communicate to a robot what an object is and how it should be manipulated.) What I'm taking from this is that discussion about strong reactions to advanced technology is just as worthy of inclusion in encyclopedia articles as the technology, if those strong reactions are likely to have definitive consequences. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 03:44, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

-_- I don't believe my eyes. As per WP:AGF, I'll hold my comments. Please stick to objective discussions. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 06:07, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Technological singularity for the win. :) · AndonicO ^Hail! 19:20, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

More light, less heat

I'll throw some things out to get us started, and feedback would be appreciated. Anyone is welcome to designate anything that I write as useless handwaving and consign it to my talk page at any time, or we can discuss things heatedly and quickly and stick it in an archive and move on. We don't need to WP:AGF from Zenwhat, he's already demonstrated that he's full of it (haha). In particular, User:Zenwhat/Zen_guide is highly recommended. Welcome. Welcome also to AndonicO, who is a polyglot admin with a very funny userpage, and of course Jameson, who re-started this project, and who will almost certainly receive his admin mop in May. In fact, every day I run into someone new on one of the robotics-related pages who is funnier, smarter, and/or more accomplished than I am, generally all before they turn 21. If I hang around much longer, I'll need Prozac.

An observation: robotics-related pages carry some burdens more than other WP pages do. One is the technophile/technophobe divide, a problem that not even the magic of WP has been fully able to dispel. When I have made edits to WP:Robot to help it conform to the Manual of Style, I have sensed distrust from the technophiles, and when I discuss technical subjects on Wikimedia sites and chat channels, I get a strong sense that I'm being given a very short rope, much shorter than if I were talking about something blander and less technical. (Obviously this could have more to do with the presenter than the material.) I've seen evidence on WP that some technophiles who are trying to get upgraded status for their favorite articles feel that admins are useless, bureacratic weasels who cover up the fact that they don't know anything about the subject by making them jump through one useless hoop after the other, and conversely, I've seen discussions by admins that they believe that technophiles make particularly difficult editors, unwilling to play by the same rules that everyone else here plays by. Comments? How can we reduce the heat and get everyone to play nice? - Dan Dank55 (talk) 20:16, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

You're all POV-pushing for anti-human\anthrophobe\robophile\pro-robot apologetics. You'll all be sorry when the robots take over and you have to pay tribute to them with human babies (see The Matrix) or through servitude to them (see I, Robot (film) and the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica). This is assuming, of course, that they don't outright EXTERMINATE the human race entirely! (see The Terminator)

Stephen Hawking is a super-genius. He's clearly seen a LOT more movies on robots than you guys. You should respect his authority on the subject and listen to him.

Alter our DNA or robots will take over, warns Hawking.

Robots are forms of property that, like nuclear weapons, must be carefully controlled (if not outright abolished) to prevent our own self-extinction.

The coming Robocracy is NOT something we should look forward to. HUAR! ☯  Zenwhat (talk) 01:57, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

OK this has got to end.

This page's objective is to discuss topics of the WikiProject, not to discuss the validity of article subject(s) revolving this WikiProject's existence. Please direct your productive rantings to those respective articles, especially HUAR. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 02:19, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

You're doing a great job of making my point, Zenwhat...this is part of the burden that we robotics editors face. Sometimes it's this blatant, sometimes it's just discomfort with the subject, a lack of support or interest.

Btw, I know my reference to "weasels" above sounds like a borderline violation of WP:CIVIL. I believe it's customary to give people a little more leeway during the brainstorming segment of a Wikiproject (as long as it doesn't boil over into personal attacks). This is a good time to discuss process questions...what isn't working? What would you like to see changed?...as well as practical suggestions for particular articles. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 02:26, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

P.S. I guess the most annoying bit for me, and I know the same happens for a lot of people working on robots, is that I just see myself as slogging through a difficult subject, trying to build something useful to make people's lives a little easier, but for some reason, the typical reaction is very off-the-wall...people have a variety of preconceptions that what roboticists are doing is hilarious, or scary, or foolhardy, or clueless and geeky...and for some reason, they are very uninhibited about sharing. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 03:21, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Well Dan, I'd like you to know that I'm very serious about kickstarting this WikiProject and you can be sure the major stuff should be nailed out most likely by the end of the week unless my birthday festivities get extended... :D I like the brainstorming, but if users have fundamental issues with this WikiProject's existence, I'd believe that these issues should have been addressed before it was created, not after. Besides, it was sitting in the Village Dump for ages.  :) - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 06:36, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

My comments were intended to be humoros (with no U's -- that makes it more American) and apparently, they did a good job at stimulating discussion, which is what this page needed. On the contrary, I hope this project goes well. We need more information on robots on Wikipedia...

...if only to prepare for their inevitable rise to power.

So long as you guys are "robotics" editors and not "robotic" editors (I will follow WP:AGF but I still have my suspicions), I wish you luck with this.

Also, expanding\writing some articles on the military robots they've been using in the Iraq war would be a neat first task, with lots of sources on the internet about it. [1]

The TV show, Futureweapons, have also had several episodes on killer roobts. ☯  Zenwhat (talk) 00:02, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

o/~ Sometimes I feel the weight of the world, it's so heavy and it's gettin' me down... - Dan Dank55 (talk) 02:29, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

An interesting problem with technology-related articles

The culture at Wikipedia, and the rules at WP:NOT in particular, might not be as supportive of robotics editors as we might want...and maybe it would be a good idea to fix that problem before we start wrestling with admins over robotics articles. There is a constant tension among three groups...and many people (like me) are in all 3 groups, so let's say, 3 different focuses. One focus is improving Wikipedia articles...there's no problem there, we know how to deal with this.

The second focus is anxiety about broader implications of technology (see above), and there's no easy fix for that. Sometimes this leads to intrusive behavior, but the bigger problem is it usually just makes people give up and go away. In the case of robotics, the problem is that everyone cares. Cars are robots, robots are used in war to kill people, food is cheap because of modern farming robots. We need robots, we can't get rid of them, but we don't know how they work, we don't trust them, and we are all suspicious of the people pulling the levers. This anxiety intrudes constantly and forcefully into WP robotics articles...not just with vandalism, although there's a lot of that. Mostly, the problem is that we don't get the same level of wiki-love and support that makes WP work so well. If you are still reading this, but your eyes have started to glaze over and you're having a strong desire to go read something else, then you understand exactly what I'm talking about.

The third focus is the desire to get something done in the real world, as opposed to writing good WP articles. This would include a student sharing information helpful to other students, a househusband who has played around with robotic vacuums and has very useful things to say about what works and what doesn't, or an expert in a particular field who knows exactly what software works and what doesn't. The most relevant WP:NOT rule here is the one about unsourced material...which works really well when dealing with, say, history, but not when the relevant subject material is being updated every month, and usually by people who are not academics or journalists.

The bottom line is that, although WP policies have done magical things in other subject areas, they aren't working as well for robotics articles in particular and technology articles in general. The person who wants to know what bird he just saw can come to WP with confidence; the person who wants to know if he can buy a robot to fetch a beer out of the fridge is going to be disappointed, because the WP process only does really well with the simplest and most well-established technological questions. It seems to me we ought to be able to do better.

I'm not looking for the magic answer to all this, but I am inviting comment, and it would be great to know where in WP similar issues have been hammered out before. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 14:31, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps an example would help. If you want to know the color of the tail feathers of some extinct bird, Wikipedia is wonderful for that, and for lots of other facts which are probably of interest to only a few people. If you want to know the names of the 3 most common robots in US or European homes, and what they can and can't do, you're out of luck if you search Wikipedia...and you'll only find out that you're out of luck after reading something over 600 pages trying to find what you're looking for. There are in fact communities of people who have good insight into what robots are popular, what they can do, how to train them, where to buy them...but these communities are not attracted to Wikipedia as much as some other communities are. That's an understatement...I have tried to get hobbyists more interested in Wikipedia, Wikia and Wikiversity (as appropriate) and failed completely. That's partly because I haven't tried for long, and partly because they don't already know how great and how important Wikipedia and sister sites are. But it's also because they feel that they would have to put up with a lot here that they don't have to put up with on their own sites. I could go into detail but I won't...I'm just trying to sketch the problem and invite people to share their perspective. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 19:23, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

For anybody who gets too caught up in this... If you're either extremely pro-robot or extremely anti-robot, and it upsets you when there are POV-pusher on the issue (with all due respect!) you should see the essay Wikipedia:Don't be a dork.

If any of you have any examples of people fighting over POV-pushing relating to technology (especially robots), let me know, because that would be a GREAT addition to the article! ☯  Zenwhat (talk) 22:00, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Motion to move "An open letter to our new members" to Outreach page

I believe the "An open letter to our new members" section is a very nice touch, but it is more geared towards the objectives of the outreach page. I'd like to motion to have this section moved as well as attach a copy to the Invitation template. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 00:16, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Bringing this WikiProject to order

Since it's been a while since anyone has taken interest in this WikiProject, I'll see if I can spruce up the place a little bit. Feel free to join in... it's so quiet here... - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 22:19, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Home Robotics

I added a link for "Home robotics". I'm getting a sense that we have two entirely different audiences here...the home robotics people are likely to need simpler English and, in general, simpler articles and a simpler approach. Many of them will have little or no experience with Wikipedia, so let's keep this link roughly where it is, that is, the 3rd section down. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 14:44, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Agreed, the "For" template is a good choice, Jameson - Dan Dank55 (talk) 19:22, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

link to "Home robotics" now deleted. I'm going to leave wikiproject robotics. It's not a problem with Jameson, it's just that the wikiproject doesn't do what I hoped...I wanted to iron some things out in a general discussion rather than individually in each article, but I don't think it's going to happen, and judging from the histories in the articles I patrol, the issues tend to be different from article to article anyway. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 15:59, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

DARPA Grand Challenge (2004)

The external links look very superfluous and messy. Can I establish consensus that finding one website which links all of the teams would be more acceptable and help clean up the article a little bit? - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 20:12, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Follow Up: Same applies on DARPA Grand Challenge (2005). - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 22:03, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

(copied from article talk page) I had to think about it awhile and do some poking around, but I totally agree. We already have the "DGC-2004 teams" link, and looking quickly, I can't find any discrepancies between their list and ours. There's a basic rule of database design: don't list the same information in two places, because it will inevitably get out of sync, and then people get bad information. Let's put the burden of updating the information on DARPA and on the teams rather than on us. - Dan Dank55 (talk) 22:29, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Userbox

I created a userbox for the WikiProject:

This user is a member of WikiProject Robotics.

If anyone would like to use it tell me and I'll create a subpage for it in my userspace. Happy editing, Midorihana^~iidesune? 07:51, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

I actually had one designed that's just sitting in my sandbox at the moment. User:Jamesontai/Sandbox15. It also includes an automatic transclusion of a listing in the WP:ROBO User Category that's on the Project Sidebar. Perhaps we could merge the two into something really kick-ass? - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 17:30, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

Oh! Hmm... I like yours, but the picture is a bit big. Midorihana^~iidesune? 06:34, 20 February 2008 (UTC)

It'd be cool if the picture could be shrunk just a tad, but the text on the picture be enlarged to make it more legible --JadeFox (talk) 07:26, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Some people in this group may be interested in my userbox:

This user has built a Robot Friend.

--- BAxelrod (talk) 05:04, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

I like all three - let's decide on an official userbox! Jiuguang Wang (talk) 21:00, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

I think the one in Jamesontai's sandbox is the best, although the design is a little busy. DBSpeakers

11:15 April 21,2008

Oh, I didn't know you guys were working on it. I posted mine on the front page and it already is a template> Hope you like it.    Juthani1    22:04, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

This user is a participant in
WikiProject Robotics.

Looks awesome. :) Midorihana^{~いいですね? はい!} 07:47, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Actually i like Juthani1's design a lot. It's simple and clean, although it looks a lot like WikiProject Technology. I added Category:WikiProject Robotics participants to the gear userbox. I'll try to tweak my userbox a bit too. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 16:23, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Project Logo

The Foundation is asking that user projects (and user pages, etc.) avoid decorative and unofficial uses of WMF logos and trademarks. As a trademark issue, they want to avoid the confusion that projects, like this one, have some official relationship with the Foundation. With that in mind, could you remove the Wiki globe from Image:Wikiprojectrobotics.png. Thanks. Dragons flight (talk) 18:43, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Scope of WikiProject Robotics

Hi - I came across the following categories

• Category:Artificial intelligence
• Category:Machine learning
• Category:Computer vision

and noticed that most articles are not associated with a WikiProject. These three fields are obviously very important to robotics, but I'm hesitant to add them to our project, since together, they cover more broad topics than the scope of WikiProject Robotics.

What I'd like to do is to start a new "WikiProject Intelligent Systems", covering topics such as:

• Computer vision - computational perception, which supplies sensory information for
• Artificial intelligence - intelligent decision making, etc, and outputs commands to
• Control theory - actuators, effectors, etc...

Robotics would play a very important role in this project, since it is the foremost example of an intelligent system. Obviously, creating a completely new WikiProject requires a lot of time and effort, so I wonder if we can establish consensus here to make the transition into this new WikiProject - we could certainly benefit from the arrival of experts in their respective fields (closely related, but outside of robotics).

Any thoughts? --Jiuguang Wang (talk) 23:46, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Dear Jiuguang,

Thank you for your quick response and for your appreciation of my comments. From outside, the probably best solution would be to have a project dedicated towards computer vision. A problem, as pointed out by Dan, is that currently there are not so many active editors in this area. Since I started contributing to computer vision articles, I have interacted with a few. Not all of them appear to be active right now. There is a diligent Wiki on Computer Vision at [[2]]. However, there is a lot that remains to be done in this Wiki. Specifically, for those articles I have looked at in this project, the regular Wikipedia articles are indeed better and more up to date. Hence, unless a sufficient critical mass of editors can be established as well as interaction links to this community be built up, I'm hesitant on starting what could be interpreted as a competing project. However, we should also listen to more people about their views.

The current status of having robotics as indirectly including other areas as subdisciplines is, however, not satisfactory either. A renaming would reduce this problem somewhat. If you make the scope wider, however, you also need competence in the other areas to build up a satisfactory basic structure to start from. I could try to help on this within the area of computer vision but not outside. My role will, however, be limited. Currently, I'm largely maintaining the articles I have contributed to. Tpl (talk) 17:00, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

I'll join, but your key problem is going to be finding article contributors. There are very few active article creators on Wikipedia in these areas. I spend most of my time maintaining guidelines and reviewing articles, but I'll help when I can. If "scope of wikiproject robotics" means if you're asking if these articles are in our scope, no, there are not many robotics editors, either. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 00:11, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

That is true - there are very few editor in these areas. --Jiuguang Wang (talk) 12:57, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, there are in fact very few robotics editors, mainly because a good majority of Wikipedia editors are either in high school or in college and does not have the proper expertise to edit higher-level subjects revolving around mechatronics and robotics. I do agree though that the three categories do fit the scope of WikiProject Robotics, especially machine learning. Please send me a message if you're interested in including those articles in our WikiProject. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 16:27, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Hi Jameson, I hope the semester went well. I have no objections to including these or any articles in the scope of Wikiproject Robotics; best of luck. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 17:30, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Recently, I notice that a large number of computer vision articles have been included into the robotics project by User:Jiuguang Wang. It is true that a large part of the work in computer vision may be relevant to robotics. It is however also the case that you can work in computer vision without ANY association to robotics. Hence, computer vision is an independent subfield of computer science on a similar independent footing as other areas of computer science, such as machine learning or robotics, however, with mutual relationsships. I would say that I as well as many other users/authors/researchers with a background in computer vision are not comfortable with this implicit decision of classifying computer vision articles as part of a robotics project. If there should be a new organizational structure for reworking the computer vision pages, this work should be done from the scope of computer vision, not robotics. Tpl (talk) 09:09, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Hi Tpl - I absolutely agree with your points above. I tagged the CV articles because

1. I mentioned above (which are also agreeed upon by two of our editors) that this WikiProject is transitioning to include not only robotics, but also intelligent systems related fields. CV is a critical part of any intelligent systems, no?
2. A large number of articles I tagged was without any WikiProject, and some others were included in WP:Computing. I think in comparison, a WikiProject in intelligent systems has a much better chance of improving these CV articles than a general project like WP:Computing. (my point is, there is currently no organizing structure for improving CV articles)
3. As there were no WikiProjects specifically for CV, I was unable to check with the other CV editors such as yourself prior to tagging.

So, these are my excuses, so to speak. To make you (and other editors with similar concerns) happy, I'd like to ask:

1. Are you happy with the reasoning above?
2. Would you like to start a separate WikiProject Computer Vision? (which I'll join)
3. Would you like to start an official proposal to rename this WikiProject to WikiProject Intelligent Systems? (which I'll support)
4. ...and then organize separate task forces for AI, learning, CV, etc...?

I like the rename idea, as I have originally proposed. But I'm open to suggestions.

--Jiuguang (talk) 13:42, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Also, I did the tagging without a bot mainly because I did not want to include irreverent topics - I think I did a reasonable job at that. if you see a math, econ, etc...article tagged by mistake, please help me remove it. Thanks! --Jiuguang (talk) 13:57, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

No problem! And Thanks for your hard work! I'll run the article bot and we'll see the new articles pop up in the logs soon. I'll post the link when I find it and it becomes updated. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 14:15, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

OK... I just ran the bot. Wikipedia:WikiProject Robotics/Assessment#Assessment Logs now has a a bunch of articles noted. Juiguang, you might want to also classify the articles as you're tagging them. Please assess the articles according to our assessment guidelines. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 14:27, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Jameson. It now seems that 75% of the articles in this project are unassessed...this should be fun. --Jiuguang (talk) 15:25, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Rename proposal for the lists of basic topics

This project's subject has a page in the set of Lists of basic topics.

See the proposal at the Village pump to change the names of all those pages.

The Transhumanist 10:16, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Changes to the WP:1.0 assessment scheme

As you may have heard, we at the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial Team recently made some changes to the assessment scale, including the addition of a new level. The new description is available at WP:ASSESS.

• The new C-Class represents articles that are beyond the basic Start-Class, but which need additional references or cleanup to meet the standards for B-Class.
• The criteria for B-Class have been tightened up with the addition of a rubric, and are now more in line with the stricter standards already used at some projects.
• A-Class article reviews will now need more than one person, as described here.

Each WikiProject should already have a new C-Class category at Category:C-Class_articles. If your project elects not to use the new level, you can simply delete your WikiProject's C-Class category and clarify any amendments on your project's assessment/discussion pages. The bot is already finding and listing C-Class articles.

Please leave a message with us if you have any queries regarding the introduction of the revised scheme. This scheme should allow the team to start producing offline selections for your project and the wider community within the next year. Thanks for using the Wikipedia 1.0 scheme! For the 1.0 Editorial Team, §hepBot (Disable) 21:21, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

A discussion

An important discussion on " Should WikiProjects get prior approval of other WikiProjects (Descendant or Related or any ) to tag articles that overlaps their scope ? " is open here . We welcome you to participate and give your valuable opinions. -- TinuCherian ^{(Wanna Talk?)} - , member of WikiProject Council. 14:54, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks the link, Cherian. While the tagging yesterday was not done by a bot, eventually, it might be wise to employ a bot to cover the various categories in this WikiProject (as you have pointed out). I think right now, the issue seems to be not conflicting WikiProjects (there isn't a WikiProject Computer Vision, AI, and Machine Learning), but rather the scope of this project (that wasn't an issue for your WP:COMP). We will most certainly work on that.

Since you are here, I was wondering if you have any suggestions on getting editors with expertise in robotics, AI, etc...over to our WikiProject? Surely there must be a number of editors at WP:COMP and WikiProject Computer Science who have been editing related articles. Your ideas will be much appreciated. --Jiuguang (talk) 15:22, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Organization

This is a continuation of the Scope of WikiProject Robotics thread above.

@ Tpl - thanks again for your comments. My thoughts on the subject consists of mainly two issues.

1. Issue 1: Assuming that we do not have enough active editors in these areas, is it better to leave the categories alone without a WikiProject, or should we expand the scope of an existing WikiProject (such as this one, since it is probably the closest related project) to include them?

I personally think that no articles on Wikipedia should be left without a WikiProject, and in this case, this project (or an expanded version thereof) should take the responsibilities to organize materials in these areas, even if we don't have enough active editors to actually improve the articles. I believe in organization - I think appropriately classified articles give people motivation to work on them.

2. Issue 2: Assume that we have enough editors to create separate WikiProjects for each of these categories. Should we do that?

What I'd like to ask as a follow-up is that if there is a WikiProject Computer Vision, how does it relate to WikiProject Pattern Recognition and WikiProject Machine Learning? It seems to me that there is so much overlap in these areas that it is impossible to draw the lines among the WikiProjects. I have serious doubt over whether a CV project in itself can stand alone, without incorporating information from related fields. If you were to do that, then that's basically a mini-WikiProject Intelligent Systems.

My ideal structure is similar to what is happening with WikiProject Biography - different types of biographies are classified under different task forces (I'm active on the science and academia task force). Granted, their scope (biography-only) is more clearly defined then our situation, but there is a clear structure, which we currently don't have.

--Jiuguang (talk) 18:02, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Scope?

Is Hell Is Other Robots really within the scope of this project? I find that odd since none of the other episodes of Futurama seem to be tagged for this project. I understand tagging pages like Bender (Futurama) but why one individual episode out of 72? And if this episode really is of mid-importance to this project shouldn't some other robot-heavy episodes be included such as Crimes of the Hot, Mother's Day (Futurama) and I Dated a Robot? It just seems strange to me is all, either include TV episodes or don't, picking and choosing the ones that happen to be featured articles is a bit odd. Stardust8212 18:05, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

I think those articles have been tagged for a while, and I'm not sure who was responsible for that - I agree with you that we shouldn't just tag FA-articles. As you can see, most articles in this project are in urgent need of reassessment, so it might be a while before we get to those. In the mean time, free feel to make appropriate modifications yourself. --Jiuguang (talk) 18:10, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Many times certain articles were tagged by bot category association. A reassessment effort is under way. If you do see similar articles that really does not fit within our project scope, please list them here so we can take appropriate action. Thanks. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 04:11, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Neither of you have really given me a straight forward answer to my question: Is this within the scope of your project? This leads me to believe it's not, I guess I should just take Jiuguang's advice and decide for myself but I thought I'd ask because most WPs are offended if you remove their tags. Stardust8212 11:00, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

My views on this is that robotics in popular culture is within the scope of this project. There should be, however, caution in tagging the articles. For example, films with heavy emphasis on robotics (I, Robot (film) seems like a good candidate) should come under this project, as well as as Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, since it starred Rodney Brooks, a notable roboticist. What shouldn't happen is that we should not tag every single movie with a robot appearance (which would be a large number of sci-fi flims).

As for the TV series, I again stress the "robot-centric" criteria. If an episode in a TV series specifically dealt with robotics, then only that particular article should be tagged, and not the entire series. (granted, there might be debate on how "robot-centric" an entire series is) I'm not familiar with the series Stardust8212 mentioned above, so I'll leave it to him to decide...--Jiuguang (talk) 13:01, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Tagging an article for a wikiproject is a way of saying "We will do something on this article, some day". I realize this forces us to take a guess; still, what is your guess? Will we do work on I, Robot (film) some day? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 13:59, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

I once took a class in roboethics, in which this film was mentioned repeatedly. Personally, this is not my area, so I doubt I'll do anything about it; but it is conceivable that someone might. There is an increase in attention in this field (the number of conferences organized is growing exponentially compared to the last decade). --Jiuguang (talk) 14:14, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Okay, that's good enough. Being able to make the argument is important. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 14:26, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

So...if you guys want me to tag the robot-centric episodes of Futurama I can do that for you, I notice Futurama and Bender (Futurama) aren't tagged either, though List of recurring robot characters from Futurama is. I just don't want to add a bunch of articles to your project list that you're never going to work on but I find the idea of only adding one episode, not even the most robot-centric episode, a bit odd especially since it just happened to be the only FA episode, it made me question whether it was added because it was within the scope of this project or because it was a featured article that was kinda related to this project. If it's the first then more articles need to be tagged, if it's the second then the tag could probably be removed (I notice the comedy wikiproject also happens to have only tagged the FA and GA articles so perhaps that's not uncommon). I don't mean to cause trouble over here, just was confused and figured I'd only know more by asking. Jiuguang - one of Futurama's three main characters is a robot and it has many other recurring and background robot characters in each episode so they are relatively significant to the series in general, you should check it out sometime if you like sci-fi comedy. Stardust8212 14:56, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

It's no trouble at all - you bring up a very good point and I really appreciate your efforts. I did a quick search, and I found the paper "From Fiction to Science – A cultural reflection of social robots" here that mentioned Futurama. From what I gathered in the paper, I'd say the series relates to the roboethics issues I mentioned above, and is within the scope of this project. In addition, if there are no objections from the other active editors (Jameson and Dan), I propose that we add other robot-centric episodes in Futurama to the project. --Jiuguang (talk) 15:17, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

No objection. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 15:26, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

No major objections. I would caution where we draw the lines. Eventually we'll have to make it black-and-white, so gray areas such as this can be removed, but until then, I believe that the majority of the common editors of this WikiProject should decide on a set of guidelines soon to prevent further confusion. PS: I <3 Futurama. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 16:10, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Cool, I'll try to sort out the appropriate articles this evening and tag them. Good luck with the project, I'll do what I can to keep my little corner tidy. Jameson - WP:FUTU. Stardust8212 17:16, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Robotics/Assessment

Since a major assessment drive is underway, I thought we should have a discussion on our assessment policies. In Wikipedia:WikiProject Robotics/Assessment, the mechanics of assessment is outlined, but I'd like to know some details on the importance scale. For example,

• Major entry articles like robotics and robot are rated Top in importance, which is reasonable. I'd also like to propose (officially) that we elevate articles such as artificial intelligence, computer vision, control theory, and machine learning to Top, as well, since they are the major subfields or fields parallel in importance.

• Other major category pages, such as Humanoid robot, should be elevated to Top. Exceptions to this would, of course, include small and less notable categories.

• There are quite a lot of articles on individual robots, like AIBO and ASIMO. Of course, those two are particularly notable robots, but for other less notable robots, how should the importance be decided? I propose that we use {low, mid} for articles in Category:Robots, and no High be used in this category unless the robot is extremely notable.

• I'm personally building up a sizable number of roboticists in Category:Roboticists. I propose that notable researchers receive a Mid importance rating, and others Low.

--Jiuguang (talk) 16:39, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

That all sounds fine; no objections. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes)

Template:WikiProject Robotics

The main template for the project, Template:WikiProject Robotics, could use a little update:

• Capitalization issues - I'm noticing that other WikiProjects uses a certain space and capitalization in their tag banner that we are not following. See Talk:John J. Leonard, for example, only our WikiProject do not capitalize "stub".

• Agreed. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes)

• Given that we recently incorporated articles in vision, learning, etc.., I propose we add a "field" parameter to the template to better classify the articles. See Template:Sys rating for an example. --Jiuguang (talk) 16:43, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

• It would make more work for us, and also potentially creates conflicts with editors if we disagree with the significance of their article. Are there positives to balance the negatives? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 17:46, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

By "field", I mean classifying the articles into major WikiProject categories. This is distinct from article categories, since they are fewer in number and without subcategories (right now, you can't tell me exactly how many robot-specific articles exists, since they are distributed into subcategories in Category:Robots and hard to identify). What do you mean by negatives? This doesn't seem to be controversial, merely a organizational tactic.

This does create significant more work for us. Perhaps I can work on better categorization in the article space, and see if it is sufficient. --Jiuguang (talk) 18:17, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

There are two negatives, but I could agree to your proposal if it will help us somehow if we can say "Wikiproject Robotics believes that there are X articles on robotics currently on Wikipedia"...what does that do for us? The two negatives are that it will take time, and that it will create potential conflict. If you haven't worked on an article, and you put a label on the article saying "I believe that this is (or isn't) about X", and the editor(s) disagrees, you get conflict. It's fine to run the risk of conflict, as long as it's in a good cause...what's the good cause? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 19:01, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Well, suppose that the categorization is in place - User:Tpl above, who is an editor in computer vision, can now clearly identify the articles within this WikiProject that are within his interests. This would, in part, settle the issue raised previously that there are now various topics parallel to robotics within this project.

I still don't see your second negative - if I say that I want to classify Category:Computer vision articles under a "field" call Computer Vision, does that create conflicts?

And also, isn't this identical to Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide/Task forces? --Jiuguang (talk) 19:20, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

The more people involved, the better; the fewer people involved, the more likely it is that someone won't like what you're doing. Would Tpl be willing to help us identify computer vision articles? - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 19:29, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Dan, I have seen your comments talking about how we are going to go through every single article and improve every single one of them. I think you'll have to accept the fact that we will not get to every single article. The current assessment/reassessment campaign is geared towards establishment of a good base in order to proceed with the next step, which would become improving individual articles through group work, such as Article Improvement Drives or Article of the Week/Fortnight/Month. However, we're not there yet.

Regarding the establishment of task forces versus categorized topics, I believe since we only have a handful of active editors at the moment, that we stick with categories (or else we'd be essentially starting our own task forces (Dan, remember the short-lived Home Robotics Task Force? The page still exists btw, but it goes to the WikiProject Robotics BORKED page. I like the kitty. haha) Anyways, the following are the proposed categories. Please approve or add to the list as necessary. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 06:00, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Ha, we need a more dangerous looking cyborg kitten. --Jiuguang (talk) 12:31, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

---

List of Proposed Categories

• People (Roboticists, famous people)
• Fiction (Movies, Characters, Books, Poetry, Songs)
• Computer Vision
• Artificial Intelligence
• Control Systems
• Robots
• Machine Learning
• Research Topics
• Hardware Components

---

Support

1. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 06:00, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
2. Jiuguang (talk) 12:29, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Oppose

Addendums

Proposed changes

---

Oh yeah, and just so you guys know, I'll need someone to help me program in the categories into the project banner, because I wouldn't have a clue as to what I would need to do for this. I might end up copying WP:Technology, but I'll still need help. If someone knows how to do this efficiently, please let me know. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 06:00, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm getting a headache over the template syntax, as well. Without promising anything, I can take a look. --Jiuguang (talk) 12:29, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Hey guys, just a suggestion, you could convert you project banner to use {{WPBannerMeta}}, I just did it for the Futurama WikiProject Banner {{FuturamaWikiProject}} and while it is time consuming to implement it should make your future changes to the banner a bit easier, the code looks a million times simpler than what you have now. Plus that way it gets included in wikipedia-wide changes like automatic inclusion of C-class. It has instructions for adding quality, importance, taskforces, etc. and seems to be pretty customizable, I can help if you want, even though I'm not technically a member of this project. Stardust8212 12:57, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Thank you - that looks very promising. I've started a draft at User:Jiuguang Wang/Template:WikiProject Robotics. --Jiuguang (talk) 13:08, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Well Stardust, you're more than welcome to join us! :D - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 17:22, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm an engineer but I know little to nothing about robotics, except in pop-culture of course. I'm probably just dangerous enough to proofread and copy-edit, and poorly at that. Stardust8212 22:51, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

New {{WPBannerMeta}} issues

So, while editing the new {{WPBannerMeta}} template, I've encountered some issues due to our existing category setup. A few of our current WikiProject categories uses non-standard capitalization - for example, Category:Category-class Robotics articles , the "class" should be capitalized. Since I can't change that in the new template, I'll make the modifications in the existing template...--Jiuguang (talk) 15:00, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Well, if we have non-standard capitalization (it happens... I started making those categories around 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning last year), feel free to move the category name to the correct capitalization. It'll work for now such that it'll just redirect. You'll also find some non-standard categories like "List class robotics articles" probably. I've pretty much been utilizing what WP:UNI was using in addition to some other larger WikiProjects as reference. If you see something that doesn't belong, please let me know. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 16:43, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I've made the appropriate changes in the template, but apparently, it takes a few days to update the category? I guess we'll wait and see what happens. --Jiuguang (talk) 16:50, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Featured content

On 11 July, 2008, Did you know? was updated with a fact from the article Visual odometry, which you created or substantially expanded. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.

Do we have a place where we can keep track of the robotics articles featured on DYK? --Jiuguang (talk) 13:51, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Not yet, but I can make one! :D - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 14:01, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Done. (Actually I made a couple hours ago...forgot to follow up... :D) - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 16:20, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, I saw - hopefully, I'll add a couple of more entires this weekend. --Jiuguang (talk) 17:21, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Woohoo! 2 more DYKs! Thanks Jiuguang Wang again! :D - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 19:03, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Robotshop is up for deletion

Hi, Robotshop is up for deletion but it seems like it may be a noteworthy company. Can anyone offer insight to help find sources or otherwise help other editors clue-in if this company is notable? Banjeboi 13:32, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

So I removed the first wave of blatant spam. I'm kind of busy today and I can't finish the review right now, but I'll be back later on today. If someone else can hop on the bandwagon and help me remove the rest of the spam that'd be great. Thanks. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 17:25, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

AI

Some time ago I wrote a program which has the capability of reducing multiple state logical equations to minimum form. I recall that even today in some of the projects started by the former Soviet Union (space projects) technicians and engineers still talk as if they are robots sentenced to binary logic. To test the value, action or benefit of the program I designed it to accept multiple state logical equations using a letter of the alphabet followed by a numerical state which I abandoned temporarily and relied on position to denote a variable and an integer to denote it's state. The variables and states were assigned meaning and then equations were formed and submitted to the program which reduced them to minimum form. The results were amazingly human as though a friend had turned and said, "Oh you mean such and such," on the order of a response you might expect from Star Trek Data's Positronic Brain. -- adaptron (talk) 13:01, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

• ...A Method for Simulating the Process of Logical Human Thought. -- adaptron (talk) 05:06, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

: So you are coming from an AI background - ignore my response on my talk page, then. If you are purely referring to Boolean logic equations, are you familiar with the Quine–McCluskey algorithm? Can you tell me the difference between the program you wrote and that algorithm? For circuits, there is also the Espresso heuristic logic minimizer, but that's perhaps application-specific.

The method for reducing multiple states originated from a method called the Harvard Chart Method of logical equation reduction I found described in a book entitled "Digital/Logic Electronics Handbook" by William L Hunter and published by Tab Books. I posted the original method here several years ago but then removed it when there was no response from either the author or the publisher. Later someone else republished it here but it has since disappeared. My research indicated that the original method may have been developed in the 1950's by a logician at Boroughs Corporation rather than at Harvard at an earlier time. A write up I found indexed and abstracted in an IEEE journal may have told more but I did not feel like spending $150 for a membership at the time to access the full article since I had already modified the method to do multiple states and decided to wait until later to do the history. -- adaptron (talk) 17:41, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

• ...a further Internet search reveals Harvard Chart Method was moved to the Harvard chart method. -- adaptron (talk) 04:31, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

In mathematics and computer science, there is automated theorem proving, which is a hard problem to solve. If your program solves a general problem like that, then it might be worth looking into. --Jiuguang (talk)

::I have been using MathCad since version 3 or 4. Version 4 included Maple which had algorithms to resolve variables that worked on fairly complicated equations. It did not include the ability to solve logical equations which I thought was odd since Maple was written in Canada where logic is a big topic of concern. -- adaptron (talk) 17:41, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

For others interested, see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Optimal classification for a case of WP:NOR by User:Adaptron and associated WP:SOCK. --Jiuguang (talk) 14:48, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks Jiuguang for revealing yourself to be a backstabber. Others be warned! -- adaptron (talk) 00:08, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

• Comment: I have crossed out all discussions on this page regarding User:adaptron following the recent indefinite block after Wikipedia:Suspected sock puppets/Julie Dancer. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 01:38, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

---

Proposal: WikiProject Robotics Barnstar

I have made a barnstar for this WikiProject. Please give me your thoughts on it here. Thanks. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 04:17, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

By the way, if someone can do some photoshop work to incorporate the gears into a barnstar, that would be awesome. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 04:25, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

Y Done New {{Robotics Barnstar}} has been created. Please follow the template document for proper syntax usage. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 01:36, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Articles flagged for cleanup

Currently, 1071 articles are assigned to this project, of which 304, or 28.4%, are flagged for cleanup of some sort. (Data as of 14 July 2008.) Are you interested in finding out more? I am offering to generate cleanup to-do lists on a project or work group level. See User:B. Wolterding/Cleanup listings for details. More than 150 projects and work groups have already subscribed, and adding a subscription for yours is easy - just place a template on your project page.

If you want to respond to this canned message, please do so at my user talk page; I'm not watching this page. --B. Wolterding (talk) 18:09, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Sure, it sure wouldn't hurt. Thanks for letting us know! - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 06:27, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Banners

I was on the WikiIRC channel and came across this: User:Lady Aleena/Test banner. Will this offer more or less abilities for us? - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 06:28, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

One advantage it has over the existing banner is this "improvement" drop down, but I see you still have to enter parameters like "attention=yes". It would be really interesting if the banner can pick up clean up tags in the article itself, and sort the article in our WikiProject accordingly. That would be a useful feature. --Jiuguang (talk) 12:14, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

FYI: The new template is explained further here. Anyone else want to pitch into the discussion is more than welcome to. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 23:45, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Titan the Robot article created

Hey guys, I created this article. Still needs work, if anyone can help out. ScienceApe (talk) 17:06, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

No offense, but this article looks like a textbook example of a possible WP:HOAX, especially since the only real inline citation is a youtube video, which does not satisfy WP:RS whatsoever. (Also words like rumor never helps either) I'll be gone for the rest of the day, so I can't get to it before someone might nominate it for deletion. Whoever wants to work on this will have to gather some extensive reliable third-party sources for some decent inline citations and establish notability. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 17:28, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

This is just for future reference, ScienceApe, but the next time you create an article that may not survive peer review by other Wikipedia editors (to delete), please put it in your WP:SANDBOX and link us to the sandbox page. That way we all have more time to refine the wording, provide sources, etc. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 17:30, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

It's not a hoax. Not too many sources, other than their official website. http://www.cyberstein.co.uk/ which I did list on the article. There's also a Q/A at WikiAnswers http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_titan_the_robot_a_real_person_or_a_machine You can try google Titan the Robot on google as well, and it brings up some hits. ScienceApe (talk) 18:33, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Uh, WikiAnswers is not a third-party reliable source, neither is the robot's manufacturer (Cyberstein's website would be a primary source). Please read the link on WP:RS. Until then, I will mark the tag with the associated article issues. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 22:15, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't seem like it's a hoax, more like it's an act of some sort. [3] Midorihana みどりはな 23:21, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

I know, but it's better than nothing. For now, this is pretty much what I can find for this robo. ScienceApe (talk) 23:35, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Comment: I don't think it's a hoax after doing a little background, but I still think this article lacks the reason to be on Wikipedia. Sure it's been on BBC, but wouldn't those just be a WP:ONEEVENT issue? It doesn't establish notability if all it does is verify that something exists. Also, the tone of this article is kind of sketchy. I'm still not sure of this article yet. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 23:41, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

James, I let the robotics project page know about this article I created specifically so you guys can help improve it. I wrote the article in just a few minutes, it's really just a stub right now, and needs some help. ScienceApe (talk) 00:52, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

I think right now what the article needs is some good solid sources to help build up the article. Hopefully we can find some on Google or elsewhere... Midorihana みどりはな 21:53, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

IRC channel?

Anyone interested in keeping an IRC channel for our WikiProject? Interested persons please let me know. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 07:40, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

That might not be a bad idea, actually. It would be nice to have somewhere to talk, off-wiki - we might have trouble doing these really organized weekly meetings like other projects, though, since we have so few active editors. --Jiuguang (talk) 12:17, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

I would be interested in IRC, sounds like a good idea. Midorihana みどりはな 04:08, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

I sent Sean an email, hopefully he'll point me in the right direction to getting one. Haven't gotten an email back from him yet, so I'll wait til Monday. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 17:25, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Update

On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 08:47, Jamesontai <j...com> wrote:

> Hi, I'm interested in requesting a channel on freenode for WikiProject Robotics on the English

Wikipedia. I'd like to know what steps I need to take to see this through. Any help or help point

me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. Thanks and have a great day!

Hey there. Sorry for the lateness of this response.

I would recommend #wikipedia-en-robotics - please feel free to go ahead and register it, by joining and then typing /msg chanserv register #wikipedia-en-robotics .

I don't know how experienced you are with IRC, so, let me know if you need any further help.

Thanks,

Sean

---

So I'm going to now create the room. I'll register it under my username since I'm there a lot. I'll post again when it's done setting up. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 18:36, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

---

[11:40] *** -ChanServ- #wikipedia-en-robotics is now registered to Jamesontai.

[11:40] *** -ChanServ-

[11:40] *** -ChanServ- Channel guidelines can be found on the freenode website

[11:40] *** -ChanServ- (http://freenode.net/channel_guidelines.shtml).

[11:40] *** -ChanServ- Freenode is a service of Peer-Directed Projects Center, an

[11:40] *** -ChanServ- IRS 501(c)(3) (tax-exempt) charitable and educational organization.

[11:40] *** -ChanServ- This is a primary namespace channel as per

[11:40] *** -ChanServ- http://freenode.net/policy.shtml#primarychannels

[11:40] *** -ChanServ- If you do not own this name, please consider

[11:40] *** -ChanServ- dropping #wikipedia-en-robotics and using ##wikipedia-en-robotics instead.

[11:40] *** Mode change "-s+tc" for channel #wikipedia-en-robotics by ChanServ.

Yup! It's made and ready! - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 18:46, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! Midorihana みどりはな 03:29, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Category renames

Please see Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2008 August 11#Robot categories. Thanks! --Jiuguang (talk) 23:05, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, I weighed in on 4 of the categories. No opinion on ecological robots. - Dan Dank55 (talk)(mistakes) 02:31, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

I actually agree with you - I don't particularly care about the deaths category, and the art robots are not in my expertise, so I can't really maintain it, anyway. I only really care about not coining new terms like "animalian robot", and abandoning a clear structure just because there are not enough articles. --Jiuguang (talk) 02:47, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Help with WP:GAR

Hey guys, Robot is at WP:GAR. I'm working on the section Eastern and Western views at the moment. I have Hornyak's Loving the machine: the art and science of Japanese robots, which is great on a Japanese perspective. I'll start adding things from that. If anyone has opinions on Chinese or other Asian perspectives, please feel free to jump in. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 19:21, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia 0.7 articles have been selected for Robotics

Wikipedia 0.7 is a collection of English Wikipedia articles due to be released on DVD, and available for free download, later this year. The Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team has made an automated selection of articles for Version 0.7.

We would like to ask you to review the articles selected from this project. These were chosen from the articles with this project's talk page tag, based on the rated importance and quality. If there are any specific articles that should be removed, please let us know at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.7. You can also nominate additional articles for release, following the procedure at Wikipedia:Release Version Nominations.

A list of selected articles with cleanup tags, sorted by project, is available. The list is automatically updated each hour when it is loaded. Please try to fix any urgent problems in the selected articles. A team of copyeditors has agreed to help with copyediting requests, although you should try to fix simple issues on your own if possible.

We would also appreciate your help in identifying the version of each article that you think we should use, to help avoid vandalism or POV issues. These versions can be recorded at this project's subpage of User:SelectionBot/0.7. We are planning to release the selection for the holiday season, so we ask you to select the revisions before October 20. At that time, we will use an automatic process to identify which version of each article to release, if no version has been manually selected. Thanks! For the Wikipedia 1.0 Editorial team, SelectionBot 22:37, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks SelectionBot. Btw guys, selection criteria also included the average monthly hits, which means each wikiproject may have a few stinkers in the batch. I'm going to record versions of our articles as soon as I've finished with them, but if you want to make changes, please do, and record the new version number for 0.7. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 23:46, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

0.7

I will be more than happy to help improve quality on the 33 robotics articles that made the Version 0.7 cut, if someone will list them at the 0.7 copyediting requests page here. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 12:41, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

You know, there is a lot of random pages in the project: why is Bill Gates, 3, and Ant within the 33 articles list? And Gundam as mid-importance? We should have a more selective list to submit, perhaps with the top-importance articles. --Jiuguang (talk) 13:07, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Articles can be added to or removed from the selection list. There's a page to do this, but since those guys are going to be slammed for time when all the wikiprojects are notified today, just list here any articles you'd like to add or delete from the selection. For instance, Ant is definitely going on the DVD since it's a Featured Article and tagged by more than one wikiproject. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 13:16, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

• I'll get us started; feel free to disagree, add, or delete.
• I untagged 3; I couldn't find any robotics content, and that would be a tough article to work on. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 13:48, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
• I untagged Autonomy since only one sentence is about robotics; Autonomous agent would be a better choice for us to work on, I think. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 13:59, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
• Untagged Ant. No robotics that I can see in this article. Biomimetics would be a better choice for us than Ant IMO. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 16:45, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
• Btw, my goal isn't to reduce the number of tagged robotics articles, I just want the robotics articles on the 0.7 DVD to be about robotics, and not to suck. I'm tackling all of these myself, and anyone is welcome to jump in, of course. When I get to the end of the list, I'll be happy to look at improving and adding other articles. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 16:59, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
• Removing tag from Biotechnology; only one word was relevant (robotics). - Dan Dank55 (send/receive)
• Removed tag from Cellular_automaton; no robotics. Okay, the rest look good; I have listed the start-class articles for help at WT:1C. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 03:48, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
• Per User:Hiding, adding WP:ROBO tag to the following WP:COMICS articles on the 0.7 DVD: Iron Man, Iron Man (film), Brainiac (comics) and Doctor Octopus. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 17:14, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Autoassessment for the Project

34 of 376 unassessed articles of WP:ROBO were autoassessed based on already done assessments by other projects on the same talk page per request of - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} by TinucherianBot. FYI -- Tinu Cherian - 09:43, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! :D - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ contribs} 13:16, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Portal Updates

We need to update our portal. Interested individuals, please meet on #wikipedia-en-robotics ^connect. Thanks. Feel free to discuss improvement suggestions here as well. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ guestbook ♦ contribs} 23:03, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

I just joined this wikiproject. I have a lot of interest in robotics and was wondering if you wanted me to do anything. I'm decent at writing and have been involved with the FIRST robotics program. 16:37 3 January 2009 (PST) Jivril (talk)Jivril

Welcome Jivril. Pick any article, add some stuff, and I'll be happy to see if I can help. - Dan Dank55 (send/receive) 01:09, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Welcome Jivril, let me know if you need some help. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ guestbook ♦ contribs} 09:33, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Discussion at Talk:Robot Fighting League

There is discussion regarding the notability of the RFL. Please discuss at its talk page. Thanks. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ guestbook ♦ contribs} 07:31, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Automatic number plate recognition FAR

I have nominated Automatic number plate recognition for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here.--Peter Andersen (talk) 20:07, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Please note my post at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Computer science#Artificial Intelligence issues branching between WikiProjects. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ guestbook ♦ contribs} 05:48, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Coordinators' working group

Hi! I'd like to draw your attention to the new WikiProject coordinators' working group, an effort to bring both official and unofficial WikiProject coordinators together so that the projects can more easily develop consensus and collaborate. This group has been created after discussion regarding possible changes to the A-Class review system, and that may be one of the first things discussed by interested coordinators.

All designated project coordinators are invited to join this working group. If your project hasn't formally designated any editors as coordinators, but you are someone who regularly deals with coordination tasks in the project, please feel free to join as well. — Delievered by §hepBot (Disable) on behalf of the WikiProject coordinators' working group at 06:26, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

What is the difference between a "Space probe" and a "Robotic spacecraft"?

I learned only today that their are two separate Wikipedia articles on unmanned space vehicles: Space probe and Robotic spacecraft. I'm not sure I see the value of two articles, especially as currently described where their definitions seem to overlap (and be fuzzy). Are not all unmanned space vehicles robotic in the sense that they make complex operations (electronic, electical, mechanical, whatever) without human operators. I'm wondering if some of you with more robtics expertise might be able to help us with the discussion. So please drop by Talk:Robotic spacecraft or Talk:Space probe to weigh in with your thoughts. N2e (talk) 19:18, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Responded. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ guestbook ♦ contribs} 20:07, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Rough set

It's been tagged as belonging to your project, and I was wondering whether it belongs there. Please comment there as well as here, as I may not monitor this page. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 15:00, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Article alerts

This is a notice to let you know about Article alerts, a fully-automated subscription-based news delivery system designed to notify WikiProjects and Taskforces when articles are entering Articles for deletion, Requests for comment, Peer review and other workflows (full list). The reports are updated on a daily basis, and provide brief summaries of what happened, with relevant links to discussion or results when possible. A certain degree of customization is available; WikiProjects and Taskforces can choose which workflows to include, have individual reports generated for each workflow, have deletion discussion transcluded on the reports, and so on. An example of a customized report can be found here.

If you are already subscribed to Article Alerts, it is now easier to report bugs and request new features. We are also in the process of implementing a "news system", which would let projects know about ongoing discussions on a wikipedia-wide level, and other things of interest. The developers also note that some subscribing WikiProjects and Taskforces use the display=none parameter, but forget to give a link to their alert page. Your alert page should be located at "Wikipedia:PROJECT-OR-TASKFORCE-HOMEPAGE/Article alerts". Questions and feedback should be left at Wikipedia talk:Article alerts.

Message sent by User:Addbot to all active wiki projects per request, Comments on the message and bot are welcome here.

Thanks. — Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 09:37, 15 March, 2009 (UTC)

Proposed addition to people counter entry

Embedded Stereo Vision

Embedded Stereo Vision devices use two camera lenses in order to incorporate height data into the onboard intelligence algorithms and greatly increase system accuracy.

These devices are IP addressable and have the ability to capture and send counting, service, queueing, and various other metrics as well as record a video stream to validate system results. No additional on-site computer or data aggregation hardware is required. All image processing and behavioral analytics are performed on the camera and data is delivered at configurable time intervals, thereby making embedded stereo vision people counting a low bandwidth solution.

The incorporation of stereo data into the image processing and analytics allows the stereo camera to operate reliably and accurately in normal, high, low, and varying lighting conditions.

Advantages:

• Typical accuracy of 95% or higher.
• Can provide directional counts through a wide variety of entrance types and sizes.
• Can filter object based on height and object type (eliminate or include counting of carts and children)
• Lower total cost of ownership (no battery replacement, no additional hardware on-site, power and data provided over standard cat5 802.3af Power-over-Ethernet)
• Accurate in high or low volume environments.
• Accurate in both high and low light environments.
• Easy installation.
• Overhead mounting prevents tampering and blocked sensors.
• IP addressable and highly scaleable (embedded architecture eliminates the need for PCs or servers on-site).
• Mounting options are available from 8-40 feet.
• Operates indoors and outdoors.
• Supports additional metrics.

Chris.mcrae (talk) 21:59, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

I added an article on "ant robotics". I am not sure where it should best be linked into the current article. I provided a couple of links but perhaps others see better ways of referring to the new article. Antonbharkamsan (talk) 18:25, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

What's missing?

The Outline of robotics attempts to overview this subject, showing its structure while providing links to all the key topics on Wikipedia that make up the subject.

It's like a site map or table of contents to robotics on Wikipedia.

What's missing?

The Transhumanist 00:28, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

P.S.: Some other well developed outlines include Outline of Japan, Outline of forestry, Outline of Buddhism, and Outline of cell biology. For the whole collection, see WP:OOK.

Industrial Robot

I need help on Industrial Robot. It is under attack by some guy trying to advertise his company but his products do not conform to the ISO definition at the top of the article or the talk page. I keep deleting it, he keeps putting it back. Robotics1 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 00:00, 28 November 2009 (UTC).

FAR

• Wikipedia:Featured article review/Three Laws of Robotics/archive1

At WP:FAR YellowMonkey (bananabucket) (Invincibles finally at Featured topic candidates) 05:20, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

WP 1.0 bot announcement

This message is being sent to each WikiProject that participates in the WP 1.0 assessment system. On Saturday, January 23, 2010, the WP 1.0 bot will be upgraded. Your project does not need to take any action, but the appearance of your project's summary table will change. The upgrade will make many new, optional features available to all WikiProjects. Additional information is available at the WP 1.0 project homepage. — Carl (CBM · talk) 03:51, 22 January 2010 (UTC)

Category:CNC, CAD, and CAM

FYI, Category:CNC, CAD, and CAM has been nominated for renaming. 70.29.210.242 (talk) 06:19, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

Missing robotics topics

I've update my list of missing techology topics including its section related to robotics - Skysmith (talk) 12:14, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, that's helpful. - Dank (push to talk) 12:40, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

new topic

there should be an article on soccer robos, roxy: JELLO says HELLO (talk) 00:23, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

-as far as I'm aware, there are no dedicated soccer robots; the ones used are just other robots that have been trained to play soccer. I agree however that an article should be made, I'll make it sometime soon. I think it should be called "Football robots", since the game is known more widely as that.Owen214 (talk) 02:13, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Robotics articles at Scholarpedia.org

There is a peer-reviewed version of Wikipedia at Scholarpedia.org, that only has a small number of articles, but maybe some of the content is useful to add to Wikipedia, such as the "Light-weight Robots" page? (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Light-weight_robots)

They are mainly AI articles but have a section on robotics: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Category:Robotics What do you guys think? Shervinemami (talk) 08:35, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

We do not intervene with off-wiki projects. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ guestbook ♦ contribs} 21:02, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Three Laws of Robotics

Hi

Having had the article Three Laws of Robotics delisted from FA I am trying to start a little initiative to get it back up to FAC status.

Please can anyone who has a specific interest go to Work required and look at the problems listed and comment on any ideas they may have in the section Addressing the problems below it.

Any responses please place in the relevant section after the Proposed solution header

Thanks Chaosdruid (talk) 02:58, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

ADL (Action Description Language)

Hi there,

I'm kindof newbie with Wikipedia, so apologies if I'm missing the place to say this :).

I'm expanding the article of ADL, which seems to be just a translation of the Wikipedia. If there is any tip on it, I would appreciate it. Kikoso (talk) 13:36, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_description_language

Robotics articles have been selected for the Wikipedia 0.8 release

Version 0.8 is a collection of Wikipedia articles selected by the Wikipedia 1.0 team for offline release on USB key, DVD and mobile phone. Articles were selected based on their assessed importance and quality, then article versions (revisionIDs) were chosen for trustworthiness (freedom from vandalism) using an adaptation of the WikiTrust algorithm.

We would like to ask you to review the Robotics articles and revisionIDs we have chosen. Selected articles are marked with a diamond symbol (♦) to the right of each article, and this symbol links to the selected version of each article. If you believe we have included or excluded articles inappropriately, please contact us at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8 with the details. You may wish to look at your WikiProject's articles with cleanup tags and try to improve any that need work; if you do, please give us the new revisionID at Wikipedia talk:Version 0.8. We would like to complete this consultation period by midnight UTC on Monday, October 11th.

We have greatly streamlined the process since the Version 0.7 release, so we aim to have the collection ready for distribution by the end of October 2010. As a result, we are planning to distribute the collection much more widely, while continuing to work with groups such as One Laptop per Child and Wikipedia for Schools to extend the reach of Wikipedia worldwide. Please help us, with your WikiProject's feedback!

For the Wikipedia 1.0 editorial team, SelectionBot 23:32, 19 September 2010 (UTC)

Request for active members

Hi

I have posted a request for all current active members to post their status (or not) at the discussions page Category talk:WikiProject Robotics participants I have tried to contact James but to no avail :¬(

There are a couple of things that need doing, we have lots of articles that are unassessed and no importance given and I have updated the table today to find no real changes since it was last run. (see the main project page for the table)

The bot that puts the recent changes seems to be not working and some of the links on the main page nad th eproject page are no longer functioning.

Basically we need to do some housecleaning and I cannot do it all on my own :¬) as we seem to have no assessment team.

There is in my opinion a need to update quite a few things and that can only be done through consensus where common sense does not give ann obvioous choice. By common sense I m ean that updating the tables is fairly simple and is done by a tool and as it cannot be influenced by the user running it is a common sense thing that does not need consensus - it should be done regularly and can be done by anyone and the project page automatically updates once it has been run.

Other problems involve things like checking refs and going through the current FA, GA, A-class etc. These can be done quite quickly using a number of bots and tools which the FA and GA assessment teams use but since the last real functions of the project were around early 2009 we need to identify thos who can join the team, work out a strategy and implement the assessments and checks.

Chaosdruid (talk) 17:54, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

I have not been active since 2008 unfortunately. Although I do come online and check here from time to time when I need to look something up, I no longer participate in active WikiProject tasks because I do not have the time to do so. I am really glad that people are finally taking a new interest in robotics on Wikipedia. If you need assistance, I could give you pointers and let you know how I set the WikiProject up, but in general I will not be able to spend too much time on here. - Jameson L. Tai ^{talk ♦ guestbook ♦ contribs} 21:05, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

I will reply on your userchatpage Chaosdruid (talk) 21:40, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

I am interested in the review process. Please tell me where I should start/help on my talk page ^The World 00:49, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

Any other people out there that would like to help ? I have borught the articles through thte first stages and now we need to consider reassessing them all :¬)

Chaosdruid (talk) 14:22, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Hell is Other Robots

Surely this isn't "of interest" to a robotics project? Rich Farmbrough, 06:11, 18 September 2010 (UTC).

Hi Rich. This has been discussed before in the project when the assessments were first made. I believe the result was that it was of definite interest and well within scope - there was mention of a grey area to be later defined for black and whiteness but I think that this eisode out of all the Futurama episodes tackles several issues which mean that it is well within scope and of fairly high importance to the project. We also tagged some others I seem to remember.

There are several reasons that this is of interest. It is the first in the series to concentrate on Bender and the social aspects of Robots in society. The episode is espcecially of interest as it discusses the role of Benders soul which is something society in general ponders over when it comes to the artivficial intelligence side of robotics and how humans relate to machines. It is also interesting in that it includes scientology although that has nothing to do with the robotics project per se.

Personally I think that Bender is the most prominent robot in popular media today. I would consider him even more important than Robbie the robot, C-3PO and R2D2 and Data. While it is true that this may change as popularity for the series wanes I would say that this episode is probably the most important out of the whole series (and is within the project scope too)

I see that the importance has been put to low which I will change now as it is a little higher than that in my opinion.

Chaosdruid (talk) 14:44, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Hmm R. Daneel Olivaw has been sidelined by Bender in the twenty-first century. Does the "cats" project include Tom and Jerry, and WikiProject India, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon? Well it's up to the project to define it's own scope, it just seemed a little odd to me. Rich Farmbrough, 16:52, 6 October 2010 (UTC).

Maybe, if the project was more lively, task-forces would be the way to go "Robots in Popular Culture Taskforce"... Rich Farmbrough, 01:50, 7 October 2010 (UTC).

I understand your point - I think it is more easily understood when we consider that the project scope includes robots in fiction. That Futurama is fiction, but in cartoon form, is more a reflection of modern society and its lack of reading lol. I must agree that Bender is a sort of anti-Olivaw, he has given up on those virtues of protecting the universe, taking care of things in the long run and of bettering relations between humans and robots - he is more of an out-for-himself-take-all-I-can-and-live-for-the-now kind of guy lol.

I think that the episode is valid to be included as it does approach those points I mentioned earlier concerning robots and humans interactions. I would not think that there were any other episodes that tackled those issues at legnth apart from perhaps "Mothers day" and its fine parody of I, Robot and V.I.K.I.

Chaosdruid (talk) 14:10, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Pi

There is a relationship between pi and the alphabet. see Morale Builder 5 or Optimist 1.0 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.99.84.82 (talk) 22:10, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

? Chaosdruid (talk) 14:30, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Three Laws of Robotics up for peer review

Hi

I have finished the work on the article and have put it for peer review. Wikipedia:Peer_review/Three_Laws_of_Robotics/archive1

Chaosdruid (talk) 23:19, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Project Aiko

FYI, Project Aiko has been requested for deletion. 76.66.203.138 (talk) 09:44, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

List of programs and machines in the Matrix series

The article List of programs and machines in the Matrix series which is tagged as part of this WikiProject is nominated for deletion. If you feel like it kept or delete, please contribute here. − Jhenderson ⁷⁷⁷ 20:48, 12 December 2010 (UTC)

Talk:Three Laws of Robotics/GA1

A GA review of Three Laws of Robotics is taking place and has been put on hold for an initial seven days to allow work to take place to address concerns mainly around referencing and original research. SilkTork *^YES! 23:06, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

Joining

Here, may I join? I may be of some help.--The Master of Mayhem (talk) 20:27, 31 January 2011 (UTC)

Sure - membership is open to all - simply put your name on the list - Wikipedia:WikiProject Robotics/Participants

Please read the main page for an outline of the scope of the project and the subpages on templates for use as well as those relating to assessments - for example we do not use the "C" class of articles.

If you would like any more information please feel free to message me on my talk page or here :¬)

Chaosdruid (talk) 20:34, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

Robot wars competitors pages - add tables

Hi all

I have made a start on the Robot Wars pages, the main issue is the confusing rounds sections.

I started by making a table and put it in the Storm 2 page

If anyone has time to take a look can they add tables to the relevant pages from Category:Robot Wars competitors

Thanks Chaosdruid (talk) 16:06, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

Assessments update

(transcluded from /Assessment#Robotics_assessments_update)

Hi all

I have got as far as "P" in checking and updating the A-Z articles, but 221 of them are still unassessed and unclassified [4].

I have found a fairly high number of "Stubs" that were incorrectly labelled which I re-classed as "Start", although there were none that were deserving of a B class there were a few that were close. There were a couple of Start class that I have put to B class however.

One or two new GAs and FAs appeared, but these were mainly due to them not having a Robotics tag although within the scope of the project.

The next stage is to consider whether the classes are correct. Some I have put at C class (although the project does not use this classification normally) as they are needing only slight amounts of work to turn into B's - I will endeavour to make sure they have the "attention needed" parameter set to yes (now I have fixed it lol) to ensure they appear in the correct category for easy locating from the category page once work starts.

There are a disappointing amount of Top and High importance articles that are not at B class as well! Some work is needed on those but if anyone wishinng to help and unsure of the higher class categories, ie a novice editor, I would suggest is a good place to start.

Chaosdruid (talk) 02:42, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Done to "S" but have discovered a problem as redirect talk pages have not been put to class-NA|importance=NA and so are showing in the wrong sections.

Down to 125 left to do. Chaosdruid (talk) 05:49, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

Citation templates now support more identifiers

Recent changes were made to citations templates (such as {{citation}}, {{cite journal}}, {{cite web}}...). In addition to what was previously supported (bibcode, doi, jstor, isbn, ...), templates now support arXiv, ASIN, JFM, LCCN, MR, OL, OSTI, RFC, SSRN and Zbl. Before, you needed to place |id={{arxiv|0123.4567}} (or worse |url=http://arxiv.org/abs/0123.4567), now you can simply use |arxiv=0123.4567, likewise for |id={{JSTOR|0123456789}} and |url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/0123456789 → |jstor=0123456789.

The full list of supported identifiers is given here (with dummy values):

• {{cite journal |author=John Smith |year=2000 |title=How to Put Things into Other Things |journal=Journal of Foobar |volume=1 |issue=2 |pages=3–4 |arxiv=0123456789 |asin=0123456789 |bibcode=0123456789 |doi=0123456789 |jfm=0123456789 |jstor=0123456789 |lccn=0123456789 |isbn=0123456789 |issn=0123456789 |mr=0123456789 |oclc=0123456789 |ol=0123456789 |osti=0123456789 |rfc=0123456789 |pmc=0123456789 |pmid=0123456789 |ssrn=0123456789 |zbl=0123456789 |id={{para|id|____}} }}

Obviously not all citations needs all parameters, but this streamlines the most popular ones and gives both better metadata and better appearances when printed. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 03:17, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Videos

Hi. What do you think about addition of video links (eg. from youtube) to robots articles, in "external links" section? I think that vidoes are very important when it comes to robots (to see what they can do, how they move, etc.). But how many links can be added to a single article in your opinion? I mean those important, good quality, educational or instructive videos. If I find 10 equally important videos, can I add them all, or should I reduce them to... (how many?) Is there such limit? Danim2 (talk) 19:36, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Hmmm interesting point. If there are more official websites with videos than youtube then they should go there, if there are youtube channels then there, if they exist only as individual videos then the links should go there.

We only really need a video for each separate topic that is not covered. For example if a robot has A B and C features and video 1 covers A & B but video 2 covers feature C then both. We should not have more than 2 or 3. Try and avoid any "advertising" though! Chaosdruid (talk) 12:14, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for the answer. No concern about ads, I'm not related with any firm/corporation. Danim2 (talk) 17:49, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Infoboxes

I have amended a couple of the infoboxes on simple matters of plurality.

There is also the problem of the infoboxes being fairly high visibility items. Can you at least let us know which ones are being worked on and which are proposes for creation? It will help us keep track of exactly what is going on. Chaosdruid (talk) 12:16, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

speech generating devices

Hi there,

I've just arrived from Speech_generating_device, which I'm planning on giving quite an overhaul in the next few weeks - It's got a tag saying it's part of this robotics project - I confess this surprised me because I hadn't thought of it that way - thought I can see speech_synthesis being right up your street. Can someone of this project check that Speech_generating_device is really in your remit - obviously it would be cool to get some extra input if this is really the case... — Preceding unsigned comment added by Failedwizard (talk • contribs) 18:05, 13 March 2011 (UTC)

Sure. The reason is that robotics is the study of the parts that make up robots, robotic devices, and their sub systems.

The article used to be a stub [5] which only said:

• "A Voice Output Communication Aid creates audible speech or readable text for someone who cannot speak. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech."

As the article has developed it seems this has got lost somewhere down the line, I suspect as articles were created and developed and the page was moved in a direction more towards aids for disabled people than the general topic to which it originally referred. I will take a closer look in a little while and reassess scope etc. Chaosdruid (talk) 23:01, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

cool - thank you very much :) feel free to also give me any tips on how the article is progressing :) Failedwizard (talk) 08:46, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

Android

The use of the pagename Android is under discussion, see Talk:Android_(operating_system)#Requested_move. 65.95.13.139 (talk) 02:40, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the info Chaosdruid (talk) 08:34, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Automation

I've begun working on the Start quality Top importance articles, starting with Automation. I'd like to organise and expand upon the Applications section - at the moment it's a bit limited and I don't think it gives a true representation of the scope of Automation. I've put up a few ideas and a structure that could be used on the talk page. I'd love for someone here to have a look and give some feedback. Uwadb (talk) 05:11, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

Hi, and welcome to the robotics project :¬)

I will try and take a look over the weekend. Chaosdruid (talk) 16:44, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Odour Sensing

Ive started a page on odour sensing and would really like your help on improving the article. Currently its just the name — Preceding unsigned comment added by Malithyapa (talk • contribs) 08:31, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

Merged with other relevant articles and left as redirect (notes on talk page and users talk page) Chaosdruid (talk) 14:55, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Images linked to from Projet:Robotique

Projet:Robotique/images libres (in French) links to some free robotics images. Maybe most of them are already included here on the English Wikipedia within project articles. But if not, the collection may be of some interest. --Trevj (talk) 07:41, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Many thanks, I have looked at them and there are a couple of interest :¬) Chaosdruid (talk) 15:56, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

International Space Station

Guys ! can you tell me how many Robots are on the international space station ? Come and read the International Space Station article, and you'll be none the wiser. Is this a good thing ?

They are pretty cool, some of them move like inchworms, around the station, repositioning themselves. Seriously, there is not even a section about it in the station structure. I can write one, but I need real editors to help me with this. Come on ! Penyulap _talk 14:50, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

I have nominated International Space Station for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Penyulap _talk 14:34, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Discussed on users talk pages, though will post here when completed. Chaosdruid (talk) 19:27, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Deletion discussion for European Robotics Research Network

Hi all

An AfD has been started to delete the European Robotics Research Network article. Chaosdruid (talk) 00:29, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

robotic colonization of the moon

hello what about we do a special page with the robotic point of view and our champions (lunar solar power criswell,the automated factory growing,robotic village,lunar ring shimizu,robonaut,justin and the like]

Note left on user page asking for more explanation Chaosdruid (talk) 14:56, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

sorry for the our, i mean from the robotic point o view--Beaucouplusneutre (talk) 15:30, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

lunar solar power, david criswell

the automated growing factory concepts from the 80s (http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/GrowingLunarFactory1981.htm)

robotic village, concept from the 2000 (i have to find the references]

lunar ring from the shimizu dream page, for illustration purposes and for solar power

robonaut for project m

some concepts but maybee fun to present, wath do you think ?-_{unsigned comment}

From memory there are two major Robot bases in the making at the moment, there is at least one for the moon, I think it may be Japanese, although there may be more than one, I'd check chinese after japanese. The other one is Mars, in the '20's (or '30's with delays) there will be a Russian space station in deep space in Mars orbit. They won't land, but will have an assortment of robotic probes on the surface, operated from orbit. Then if there are signs of life, they'll take off and nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. Marpost is the name of that space station, and aliens is the name of the series. Penyulap _talk 12:41, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

I remember a japaneese one, and there is the russian one ( lunar grunt and futures evolution) if i am correct, maybee there is more than that--Beaucouplusneutre (talk) 21:28, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

GA review for Speech generating device?

Hi all,

After a little bit of work Speech generating device (part of your project for some time now) is now a good article nominee - if any of you guys would like to review it, (or even given any comments) that would be very cool indeed :)

Failedwizard (talk) 13:08, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Notability guide for ROV and AUV?

Hi, I'm an italian user and I'm not very good in english, so I'm sorry if I will make some mistake. In the italian wikiproject about ships & co. (Progetto Marina) we're discussing about a notability guide about ships and submarines (both civilian/military – sandbox here in italian). The point is that we've no idea about what to do with ROV (example) and AUV, may you have a notability guide about them yet? I imagine that AUV are not notable (is correct "notable"?) but for ROV? They're notable only if they're owned by an oceanographic facility (like this) or by a naval warfare service branch of an armed forces? (lot of words to say simply military units like Royal Navy) or something else? --Zerosei (talk) 13:10, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

In my opinion those that are routinely used, and both AUV and ROV are routine tools now, are notable only as a group. Particular ones could achieve notable status with, for examples, being the first to prove an important new concept or a non-production ROV (often at least nicknamed) that was critical in some important discovery or operation that "made the news" in an important way. Even then I think best coverage would be within a more general article dealing with the things in general or the event in which they became notable with redirects to those from news making names. In your example, WHOI, the AUV/ROVs "famous" in their operations are better covered withing articles on the institutions or service with a brief note in a sort of list or general AUV/ROV article. That pulls things together for readers rather than fragmenting the subject into many little "articles" and links. Palmeira (talk) 17:46, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

There is a rough guide to notability relating to robotics topics here . Each AUV and ROV has to be notable according to the general Wiki guidelines on notability. There needs to be a reasonable amount of media coverage, or it needs to have achieved something as a first or otherwise notable event, for it to gain notability enough to be included.

In general notability is assessed on the general guidelines, though in many cases the parent organisations are so big that they would not be left on the "parent" page, but have been separated into an article of their own. Feel free to look at some of those already in existence, such as those from the categories Category:Robotic submarines and Category:Unmanned underwater vehicles (as well as it's subcategory Category:Remotely operated underwater vehicles, specific to ROVs)

Most of the Woods Hole machines that have an article have achieved notability for their discoveries or in pushing the boundaries or current knowledge further than before. For example, I have included the Woods Hole template:

I hope this helps :¬) Chaosdruid (talk) 21:27, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

The problem, if any, is the fact that almost each generation pushed boundaries and thus can be "notable" for a small article and, thus, we get extreme fragmentation. A reader then has little more than a dictionary, not a good view of the subject. I have the same issue with many ships, including a group I've been working on, in that each has a little bit of history without really enough individually to warrant a stand alone write up. They would fit better in the context of their still obscure, but more notable mission. Palmeira (talk) 21:45, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Did you hover overclick the links for the ships listed on the WHOI ships template? You will notice that they do not necessarily go to individual articles on each "ship"; only around half have individual articles, if that. Chaosdruid (talk) 22:50, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I saw the ROV of the WHOI. In fact I agree with the thought of Palmeira: notable only if it has a record or it has engaged in a important research/undersea discovery (if I'm not wrong). So, Nereus is of course notable, and also maybe Acoustically Navigated Geological Underwater Survey and Jason Jr. (involved with the Titanic). WP:PRODUCT in my opinion is too general. About stub, WP:PRODUCT says: "Avoid creating multiple stubs about each individual product". It's a problem in it. wiki too, beacuse we don't have something like Wikipedia:Permastub, so we have to call the commons sense. When we reach an agreement in it. wiki I will tell you the contents, so, if you want, you will be able to add some improvement. Anyway, thank you for your kindly answers, if you have to say something else I will listen :) --Zerosei (talk) 22:52, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Well, don't forget ARGO, key in the discoveries of Titanic and Bismarck! Nereus was built to withstand Challenger Deep, so probably the first "deepest ever ROV" record-holder. Sentry was notable as it was the first truly autonomous and for its usage in the recent Mexican Gulf oil plume pollution investigations.

There are others, such as the other sea-sentry type auv which lies on the sea-bed waiting to be activated to investigate ships and can be used in warfare. I would need a little more time to investigate, but if you check those category pages, you will see which have been already created. Good luck! :¬) Chaosdruid (talk) 23:11, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

It comes to the question of how notable it has to be. With the oceans still relatively unexplored almost every dive one of these things makes can be "notable" to some degree. Back in my seagoing days was our finding an uncharted seamount rising 12,000 feet (only 2,000 fathoms) from its base notable or did it take finding an entire chain or ridge to make that trip "notable"? If the first, probably 75% of my trips were notable events with the others happening maybe only every few years. They were not really that notable, it was just a time of "target rich environment" for such things and just the way it often was. Personally I view the discovery or event as notable with the mechanical device (I knew the things back when they were just "fish" or "sleds" unique, ugly, cranky hand built things with attached instruments and lots of "care and feeding" to work--and they often did not--given some name for reference and documentation--and funding) best described within that or the institutional context. The exception I see would be the relatively few devices that were real technological leaps in themselves. From the reader's perspective it seems to me that contextual coverage is far better than hopping through link after link to individual devices. As a reader I look at that Nereus (underwater vehicle) piece and wonder why it has that name. Much of the text is about the dive and the location with vehicle information that could be a paragraph or table within an article about the dive or expanded coverage in Challenger Deep. Cross linked coverage within Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and significant operations would probably better inform readers if that is the goal. Palmeira (talk) 04:15, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

Notability is, in general, how much has been said/written about the device. While it is true that some may be compacted into another article, there are some ROVs which have had a great deal written about them or those that have achieved other notoriety. It is a problem if one considers it from the top down approach, i.e. Challenger Deep -> things associated with it. Nereus, ABISMO, Kaiko etc. all fall into the challenger deep problem and would perhaps cloud the CD article if they were all to be put in there. It may be true that some do not warrant their own articles, you may see that I have just removed quite a bit of material from one of the Japanese AUV's articles (as it is unnecessary mention of CD and the ROV in question has not even been there!). Feel free to go and look yourself and see if there are any others which may need trimming down. Do not forget that some devices/topics will warrant a stub article of their own - no matter how one feels personally - as guidelines exist which say that "every ship deserves an article of its own", as do others, which may cause numerous articles with little content and a fair amount of repetition. Chaosdruid (talk) 03:43, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

Artificial Neural Networks

Do Neural Network related articles also come under the scope of this project? --SMS ^Talk 20:01, 4 April 2012 (UTC)

Replied on users talk page Chaosdruid (talk) 01:46, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

WP Robotics in the Signpost

The WikiProject Report would like to focus on WikiProject Robotics for a Signpost article. This is an excellent opportunity to draw attention to your efforts and attract new members to the project. Would you be willing to participate in an interview? If so, here are the questions for the interview. Just add your response below each question and feel free to skip any questions that you don't feel comfortable answering. Multiple editors will have an opportunity to respond to the interview questions, so be sure to sign your answers. If you know anyone else who would like to participate in the interview, please share this with them. Have a great day. -Mabeenot (talk) 22:09, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

Curiosity rover

Hey all. The Curiosity rover article was split earlier today (6 Aug 2012), AFTER the successful landing of the rover on Mars, hived off from the more spacecraft-related and spaceflight-mission-related article Mars Science Laboratory. (This is a result of a consensus developed on the MSL Talk page after approx. 24 July.) So now the rover article is a robotics article and planetary science article, and not really a spaceflight article, while the MSL article retains the spaceflight/spacecraft aspects of the complicated mission.

• It would be very useful to have some other robotics-oriented eyes on the split to see if the robotics are handled/summarized well, following the split.
• Also, an editor has suggested on the Talk:Curiosity rover page that the Robot arm is not described in the article, but should be.

Anyone want to help out? Cheers. N2e (talk) 15:14, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Apologies - I have been too busy in RL over the last month and a half but should have more time now and will take a look at the articles over the next few days. I have replaced the project banner (as the whole MSL mission is robotic, not just Curiosity) and thank you for your work and the info. Chaosdruid (talk) 19:18, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Hi Chaosdruid. Thanks for engaging. That was done following a discussion and consensus on the MSL article Talk page to split the article, and keep the scope of the MSL article restricted to the spacecraft and spaceflight mission, and to take the robotic surface science mission and robotic surface instrumentation/robot-arm/robot-rover content over to an article named Curiosity rover, knowing it would grow rapidly immediately after the successful landing, which it has done, I believe being one of the most viewed articles on Wikipedia for a day or two after the landing.

So from a consistency point of view, it may not make sense to have the WProbotics tag on the MSL article unless all spaceflight/spacecraft articles (most of which are "robots" of some kind, and certainly are "robotically" controlled) also get WProbotics tags. YMMV. But that is why the tag was removed. I'll leave it to others in this project to figure out the right answer, and disposition the tag on the MSL article as appropriate. Cheers. N2e (talk) 20:22, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

There are indeed many articles in the spacecraft genre that already have robotics tags, or did. A robotic (or robotically controlled) craft falls within the scope of the robotics project, and I cannot see why they would not just because they are also spacecraft - it certainly does no harm to have them there :¬)

In fact, one of the defining frontiers of robotics is sending an automated craft out into space to travel for years and achieve a goal. I would be greatly disappointed if robotics was to be removed in favour of spaceflight on such articles. As I said earlier, I hope this is just a perception problem that can be easily fixed, I appreciate that people think more of "robot" than robotics, and as such it may well be they see the rover as more in our scope than robotic spacecraft that do not resemble terrestrial robots as much as Curiosity does. Chaosdruid (talk) 20:50, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Hmmm. As I said above, I'm happy to "leave it to others in this project to figure out the right answer". But I will say that, if your assertion is correct, then there are thousands of spacecraft articles that would need to have project tags added for WikiProject Robotics. From what I can tell, this project is not particularly active, and may not have the editors and volunteer time to accomplish that task. But hey, if that happens, I don't have any particular objection to a bunch of spacecraft articles having a robotic-project tag added. But I hope they don't also get WikiProject Chemistry tags added because they are also made of up metals, which are clearly chemical elements. For that, too, is something that is true of 100% of all spacecraft articles, just as 99.999% of all spacecraft ever launched are, also, robotic Cheers. N2e (talk) 03:37, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

I think you are taking that a little too far. I am going to take the higher ground and hope that it was in jest rather than a dig. Do you agree that robotic space craft are indeed one of the pinnacles of robotics? If so then it is inevitable that, as with robots, the robotics banner should be on those that are the most current and highest level of achievement or historical importance. I appreciate that the comment may be more in light of the discussions on the MSL page, but I am a little insulted that you appear to feel that the banner would be applied to sausages and Fiat cars (after all, they were produced and packaged using pick-and-pack robotics, and made by robtic welders and conveyor systems). Chaosdruid (talk) 13:51, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

It's true that relatively inactive projects can sometimes act like loose cannons, so I appreciate your concern, N2e. Has it actually happened? Has WP:ROBO caused any damage, anywhere? - Dank (push to talk) 13:55, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

WP Robotics for a Signpost article

The WikiProject Report would like to focus on WikiProject Robotics for a Signpost article. This is an excellent opportunity to draw attention to your efforts and attract new members to the project. Would you be willing to participate in an interview? If so, here are the questions for the interview. Just add your response below each question and feel free to skip any questions that you don't feel comfortable answering. Multiple editors will have an opportunity to respond to the interview questions, so be sure to sign your answers. If you know anyone else who would like to participate in the interview, please share this with them. Have a great day. -Mabeenot (talk) 02:48, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Reusable rocket prototype

The SpaceX Grasshopper is a reusable VTVL rocket prototype being used for testing of landing large rocket first-stage tanks back on terra firma for reuse. Obviously some heavy robotics involved that this project may be interested in. (but that article is not currently a part of the Robotics WikiProject, nor is Reusable launch system.). Cheers. N2e (talk) 05:28, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

The reusable launch system article talked about future projects and robotic systems were only a part of the whole subject, so I would not normally consider it as within scope - others may feel differently though :¬)

The Grasshopper is, I believe, a rocket test-bed and I am 50/50 about that one; the Falcon 9 would be more in scope I presume as it would be a "whole vehicle" rather than the Grasshopper which I I saw as sort of just the engine? Chaosdruid (talk) 14:53, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

The Grasshopper is definitely a rocket vehicle, a VTVL rocket, and it is a technology demonstration vehicle for SpaceX; that is to say, no economic (pay for use) purposes are envisioned by it's manufacturer, SpaceX. It is however a reasonably complex robotic vehicle, with complex control algorithms and equipment involved to maintain stability during each of many planned test flights. In this sense, it is more like one of the small robotic helicopters or quadrotors: it is intended exclusively for low-altitude purposes, and the test vehicle will never go to space, i.e., fly above the Karman line. It is very challenging to maintain stability on a large/top-heavy tank structure; but that is the point. It needs that large tank in order to stress the technology they are developing, as the same technology will later by used on the reusable Falcon 9. Cheers. N2e (talk) 04:02, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Take a look at this robotic vehicle test flight, conducted two weeks ago—conducting both a controlled hover and a controlled descent and upright landing—and see if you still believe this is not a robotic vehicle.

• Video of 3rd test launch, 17 Dec 2012

It uses some combination of autonomous and telerobotic control.

P.S. That sub-sixty-second video has gone viral, and has more than 2 million hits in the first week, since it was posted Sunday evening US time on 23 Dec 2012. Cheers. N2e (talk) 03:52, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Robotic Refueling Mission

Just letting other robotics editors know that I just created an article on the recently-completed Robotic Refueling Mission demonstrating in-space propellant transfer on a series of satellite hardware that was deliberately designed to match existing commercial and government satellites that had not been designed for refueling operations. You may also want to look at the robotic Space Infrastructure Servicing, a planned commercial mission for robotic servicing/refueling of approx. 12-15=year old satellites. Conceivably, the SIS prospects just got a boost from the technology maturity demonstrated by the NASA demonstration mission.

Would appreciate other robotics-editor eyes on the article, as well as the potential addition of the article to the WP Robotics project. (I did not add the project flag since I had just assessed the article for WP:WikiProject Spaceflight). Cheers. N2e (talk) 01:37, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Is the "WikiProject Robotics" essentially on hiatus

Is the WP:WikiProject Robotics still an active wikiproject?

It appears there is little activity going on here. I'm not suggesting that robotics is not a vibrant and rapidly advancing field of study, but I am suggesting that it would appear that the WikiProject is very quiet for such an interesting and active sub-discipline of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Mechanics, and Software Engineering.

What are others' views? Is this project an active and going concern? I know that there are at least a few of you who watch this page? Cheers. N2e (talk) 22:56, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Well, no responses in four days. Kind of quiet on the old robotic wikiproject front. N2e (talk) 05:15, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

One month after a full one-third of the WikiProject Robotics participants were directly surveyed via their Talk pages, I believe it is fair to draw the conclusion that the WikiProject Robotics project is "very slow" with very few active participants. The survey results are summarized in the subsection below.

It appears to this editor that the participants page is woefully out of date, and may warrant some cleanup; but I'm not sure how such cleanup would be done in a way that is consistent with Wikipeida policy. Perhaps will think more about that and start another section to discuss it later on. Cheers. N2e (talk) 16:04, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

February 2013 Survey Results

A survey of just over one-third of the (then) 59 participants on the WikiProject Robotics participants page was initiated on 3 Feb 2013. The survey was not a random selection, but did attempt to get a good cross-section by selecting the ten top-most and ten bottom-most participants listed to query via their user Talk pages. No further sub-selection was done by the survey taker beyond that simple selection guideline.

As of 22 February 2013, nearly three full weeks after the survey questions were left, only two of the twenty editors queried have commented on this Talk page, and one editor removed their name from the participants list. The participants list now has 58 names on it.

• Chaosdruid, who appears to have been the most active editor on this Talk page in recent months, said "the project is essentially slow, very slow. There are around five regular editors, but most are on breaks or only edit in short spells. There are some experts who contribute also, but they are only available for short periods during school holidays and even then often only respond on log on every two or three months."
• User:Dank said "I've been watching the page here, but Milhist generally keeps me busy."
• As the editor who initiated the solicitation for responses, and added the notes on twenty user Talk pages, I'll just note that many of the 20 pages I left the note on were for editors who had not been active on Wikipedia at all for a couple of years, or had been blocked, so won't be using those accounts any longer.

Not sure what conclusions might be drawn here, but that is the basic summary of the results. Thanks to Chaosdruid and Dank for responding. And thanks to everyone who is working to make Wikipedia robotics-related pages better over time on the English Wikipedia. Cheers. N2e (talk) 15:39, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Surveying WikiProject Robotic members

Hey everyone, fellow WikiProject Robotics-interested editors and roboticists.

I just placed the following text on the User Talk page of just over one-third of all WP Robotics participants. I did so on the first ten, and the last ten, WProject Robotics participants listed on the participants page as of 3 Feb 2013.

While it might be useful to take a larger sample, this 34% poll ought to get us a pretty good idea of how many, or how few, editors consider themselves part of this project as of 3 February 2013. Cheers. N2e (talk) 05:53, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi. I see you are listed as a member of the WikiProject Robotics project. Some of us are trying to assess who and how many of those Wikipedia editors who have signed on to the project in the pass seven years are still active, or would like to still be active, in the endeavor of improving Robotics-related articles on the English Wikipedia.

If you have the time and inclination, would appreciate it if you would weigh in on the Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Robotics Talk page, or perhaps indicate current interest by your name on the Wikipedia:WikiProject Robotics/Participants page. If you are no longer interested in participating, please just remove your name from the Participants page. Cheers. N2e (talk) 05:33, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

I've been watching the page here, but Milhist generally keeps me busy. - Dank (push to talk) 12:05, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi. Just a quick note - the project is essentially slow, very slow.

There are around five regular editors, but most are on breaks or only edit in short spells. There are some experts who contribute also, but they are only available for short periods during school holidays and even then often only respond on log on every two or three months.

Why are you trying to find out the level of contribution? I have basically been running the organisational aspects and tidying up things on my own for the last two years since Jamieson stepped out after his MIT work increased. I did think of closing it down and moving it to a workgroup of technology last year, but we had some new members join so I was giving it some time to see what happened.

What is your long term goal here? I spent a whole year getting all the ??? articles assessed and working on a few other things, including sorting out the project pages and categories (with a few other editors). We had got it to the stage where all articles were assessed and we were ready to move on to the next stage in March. Chaosdruid (talk) 04:34, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

I would like to see the robotics-related articles improved on Wikipedia. One small aspect of that is to find out who the fellow-collaborators are. My sense was that, due to the relative inactivity on the Discussion page, the participants list of 59 editors (as of 3 February 2013) was probably not an accurate list of who is actively involved in improving robotics articles on Wikipedia as a part of the collegial WikiProject Robotics. So I started the survey of WikiProject Robotics editors who are listed on the Participants page, or to be precise, a survey of 1/3rd of them.

So far, three days on, two editors have replied (you (Chaosdruid) and Dank) of the twenty surveyed, and one editor ( Uwadb) removed their name from the list on the participants page (so that list now has only 58 "members" listed.

I'm guessing we may not get many responses, as many of the pages (of the 20 I surveyed) were for editors who had not been active on Wikipedia at all for a couple of years, or had been blocked, so won't be using those accounts any longer. And your comment that there are only five active editors would seem to confirm that you may have a much better sense than I do about how active, and which ones, are the still existing participants in this WikiProject. Cheers. N2e (talk) 00:08, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Hierarchical Hidden Markov Models - origins and first implementations

Hi all,

It's not clear to me when Hierarchical Hidden Markov Models were pioneered. According to the following, Markov himself and subsequently Norbert Wiener hypothesized models of hierarchical sequences of states:

"The Russian mathematician Andrei Andreyevich Markov (1856 - 1922) built a mathematical theory of hierarchical sequences of states. The model was based on the possibility of traversing the states in one chain, and if that was successful, triggering a state in the next higher level in the hierarchy. Sound familiar?

Markov's model included probabilities of each state's successfully occurring. He went on to hypothesize a situation in which a system has such a hierarchy of linear sequences of states, but those are unable to be directly examined-- hence the name hidden Markov models. The lowest level of the hierarchy emits signals, which are all we are allowed to see. Markov provides sa mathematical technique to compute what the probabilities of each transition must be based on the observed output. The method was subsequently refined by Norbert Wiener in 1923. Wiener's refinement also provided a way to determine the connections in the Markov model; essentially any connection with too low a probability was considered not to exist. This is essentially how the human neocortex trims connections-- if they are rarely or never used, they are considered unlikely and are pruned away. In our case, "

Source: How to create a mind, Ray Kurzweil.

I have so far located Markov's first paper on chains, his 1907 "Extension of the limit theorems of probability theory to a sum of variables connected in a chain". I have yet not found his hierarchical models.

Does anyone know more about this? Kurzweil himself claims to have pioneered HHMMs in the 80s and 90s.

Thanks! Robolobster Robolobster (talk) 14:09, 7 February 2013 (UTC)— Preceding unsigned comment added by Robolobster (talk • contribs) 00:48, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

Cleanup of the WP Robotics Participants page

Hi everyone. Based on the very low activity level of Wikipedia editors with this particular WikiProject, I'd like to begin to clean up the Participants pages, but do so in accord with the guidelines for doing such things on Wikipedia.

I've looked around and the closest thing I found was this: WikiProject Council/Dealing with inactive WikiProjects. While this project is not inactive, just very slow with few participants, I think the guideline for cleaning up participants lists is probably appropriate for us:

you may wish to sort through the list of named participants, placing indefinitely blocked accounts and users who have made no edits to Wikipedia for long periods (e.g., over a year) under a separate heading (you may wish to notify the users that you have done so, in case they return).

I'm willing to start doing that piece of work, but thought I'd bring it up here for discussion first. My sense is doing that cleanup task would give us a first start on who the potential-active editors might be as we begin to take other actions to revive the project. What thoughts do other WProbotics editors have on this? Cheers. N2e (talk) 03:57, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

OK, but with reservations.

First I would like to try contacting anyone on the participants list that has made any edit in the last eighteen months. I would consider these active, though they might not have been active on project pages (talk or other), as a few are doing robotics tasks autonomously.

Secondly I would like to keep a couple of experts in who may well not have edited in the last year, as well as proposing Jamieson be contacted.

Thirdly there are some who respond to emails for specific items of interest, and those who have expressed an interest in getting involved with assessments and clean-up tasks that were started two years ago.

Anyone else would be considered inactive by me. Chaosdruid (talk) 14:55, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

Update

• Article alerts  Done
• Assessment  Done
• Toolserver updated N and ??? assessments looked at, top importance working down.

There appears to be an issue with updating the project info on the toolserver. I will try again later.

Chaosdruid (talk) 19:53, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

• Toolserver updated Y and ??? assessments looked at, top importance working down  Working

Adding new robotic research and development project articles

Greetings,

I am a newbie as a wiki editor, so am not sure who to ask for permission or where to place new articles on robotic research and development projects. I have complete copyright rights for data and images concerning these projects.

Thank you!

Victoria.Lee.Croasdell (talk) 05:07, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

That depends on the projects concerned. They need to be written about in secondary sources, or at least be a paper. What sort of things did you have in mind? Chaosdruid (talk) 06:13, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

Assisting in the dissemination of technical information regarding robotics and rehabilitation robotics

We would like to assist in the dissemination of technical information regarding robotics and rehabilitation robotics by sharing "Do It Your Self" Robotics Projects specifications and text from published research papers on the technologies we have developed, in the hopes that it will encourage further research and development into the humanitarian aspects of robotics worldwide. With that motive in mind I would like to include in wiki’s robotic and rehabilitation robotics area the following:

A section on “Do It Yourself Beginner Robotic Projects”

A series of projects, complete with schematics, parts lists and instructions to build simple robots. Example, simple robotic pets that are either positively phototropic or negatively phototropic. We have been teaching and sharing our project designs "for free" with educational institutions and technology centers for years, but the audience is limited to these institutions.

Perhaps these projects may be more suitable for wikiversity with a link to them from the Robotics Portal. We can supply enough information and direction to give an understanding to the general public on the structural, mechanical and electro mechanical principles regarding simple robotics. At the very least even a novice should be able to make a robot with the instinctual intelligence of a single cell ameba.

Papers on Rehabilitation Robotic Technologies

1- Abstract; "Facial Feature Interfaced Cybernetic Experiments" published by and presented before RO-MAN 2003, The 12th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication. Images are included in the paper by John Siegel and Victoria Lee Croasdell.

2- Abstract; "Interfacing Artificial Autonomics, Touch Transducers and Instinct into Rehabilitation Robotics", published by and presented before "ICORR '99 Sixth International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics". Images are included in the paper, by John Siegel and Victoria Lee Croasdell.

3- Abstract; “Robot Arm Controlled by Facial Features”, published by “CWUAAT” 1st Cambridge Workshop on Universal Access and Assistive Technology” 2002. Paper by John Siegel and Victoria Lee Croasdell. There were no images included in the paper; however we have images and video of the device being operated.

Paper on our “Public Use Robotics” and “Rehabilitation Robotics”

4- Abstract; “MRISAR, Institute of Science, Art & Robotics”, published in the “World Robotics; Service Robotics 2011”, by IFR International Federation of Robotics. We were the only company in the world to receive a complete chapter regarding our unique approach at researching and developing “Public Use Robotics Devices” and “Rehabilitation Robotics Prototypes”. We are a four member family team that has created the world’s largest and most durable selection of public use robotics, while funding our own research and development in rehabilitation robotics. Images included.

Adding Mention of and a Link in 2.1 Ancient Beginnings

On the “Robotics” page under section of 2.1 Ancient Beginnings, adding mention of and a link to the wiki page on Albertus Magnus for his automaton in 1200's. We would also like to include additional information about his work on his page.

Victoria.Lee.Croasdell (talk) 04:09, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Tactical Autonomous Combatant

The article Tactical Autonomous Combatant has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Neologism. Has seen practically no meaningful (i.e. not vandals or bots) editing since 2007. Non-notable: from Google search, program did exist, but little came out of it and the term hasn't to my/Google's knowledge been used ever again.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Ansh666 04:44, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

Resolved by redirecting. Ansh666 05:15, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

One of your project's articles has been featured

Hello, Please note that Animatronics, which is within this project's scope, has been selected as one of Today's articles for improvement. The article was scheduled to appear on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Today's articles for improvement" section for one week, beginning today. Everyone is encouraged to collaborate to improve the article. Thanks, and happy editing! Delivered by Theo's Little Bot at 07:18, 5 July 2013 (UTC) on behalf of the TAFI team

My missing topics pages

I have created Missing topics about robots and robotics - Skysmith (talk) 12:15, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

CfD discussion: Unmanned aerial vehicles of China

Please see this CfD discussion.Comments welcome. Thanks, DA Sonnenfeld (talk) 12:51, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Not archived for some reason, moving manually. (and already dealt with) Chaosdruid (talk) 15:50, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Request for a article

Hello, fellow wikipdians, I am wondering, because there is no link on article suggestion to wepons, I am wondering if anyone can make a page for the Super aEGIS II.

Thanks,

Happy Attack Dog (talk) 22:55, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

Hi Happy Attack Dog, unfortunately I doubt that an article on that particular topic could be warranted, and so may well not be made.

The problem is of notability. To get a robotics article on it, it would have to be the first of it's kind, or a major change in direction on that particular robotics topic - as an article in general, it would have to be notable enough in its own right.

The relevant topics are here: general notability, own page or in another article, Notability essays, Wikipedia:Identifying and using primary and secondary sources.

It might be that there is an argument for inclusion on the manufacturer's article, but good secondary or tertiary sources that are not the company, its website, press releases or paid articles would be needed.

Have a look and see if you can find any non-company sources first, as I cannot, post them here and we can take it from there. Chaosdruid (talk) 15:47, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Bluefin-21

We don't seem to have an article on this high profile robot. -- 65.94.77.36 (talk) 05:05, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

Someone has built a stub -- 65.94.77.36 (talk) 22:26, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

Noted, and watching. Will give it a going over later tonight and assess. Chaosdruid (talk) 15:59, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

REMUS 6000

The Rema 6000 might also be deserving of an article. -- 65.94.77.36 (talk) 00:06, 21 April 2014 (UTC)

Will take a look this week. Chaosdruid (talk) 15:59, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Prahlad Vadakkepat

Dear editors: Here is an old abandoned Afc submission that may be of interest to this project. Is this a notable roboticist, and should the article be kept instead of being deleted as a stale draft? —Anne Delong (talk) 22:16, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

Answered on talk page. Chaosdruid (talk) 16:05, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Request for Article: Wolf Robotics

I have requested an article for Wolf Robotics, which is a company I work for. I have gathered references and written a stub in my user space draft. — Preceding undated comment added 20:30, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Noted, with thanks, the possible COI declaration. I will go over the article later tonight, and if it's ok with you make some suggestions/changes? Chaosdruid (talk) 16:03, 11 May 2014 (UTC)

Since that request was made, another editor has moved the draft to article space (here). In the interest of making the article as encyclopedic as possible, changes are of course welcome. Hertzfeldt (talk) 16:38, 12 May 2014 (UTC)

Smart variables

Is this notable? An IP has prodded this stub. Bearian (talk) 17:37, 27 May 2014 (UTC)

RfC: Should Nikola Tesla's birthplace be changed?

An RfC Should Tesla's birthplace be changed? has been created. Comments are welcome.- MrX 15:48, 8 June 2014 (UTC)

Zero Moment Point needs attention

Zero moment point needs attention. It's a confusing jumble of math which fails to explain a geometric concept. The subject is important for legged robotics. --John Nagle (talk) 17:08, 27 June 2014 (UTC)

Milton Bradley Playmate

I have nominated this at WP:Articles for deletion/Milton Bradley Playmate, because I can find no confirmation that it ever existed. Comments welcome. JohnCD (talk) 18:01, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

One of your project's articles has been featured

Hello, Please note that Animatronics, which is within this project's scope, has been selected as one of Today's articles for improvement. The article was scheduled to appear on Wikipedia's Community portal in the "Today's articles for improvement" section for one week, beginning today. Everyone is encouraged to collaborate to improve the article. Thanks, and happy editing! Delivered by Theo's Little Bot at 01:00, 4 August 2014 (UTC) on behalf of the TAFI team

Comment on the WikiProject X proposal

Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:48, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Expert attention

This is a notice about Category:Robotics articles needing expert attention, which might be of interest to your WikiProject. It will take a while before the category is populated. Iceblock (talk) 00:22, 19 October 2014 (UTC)

Autonomous spaceport drone ship

The new article, Autonomous spaceport drone ship, would benefit from another pair of eyes from someone in the robotics wikiproject. I've reflected some robotics content in a link or two, and on the Talk page, but someone with more background in autonomous vehicle control would likely make the article better in short order. Cheers. N2e (talk) 16:48, 23 November 2014 (UTC)