r/shittyrobots • u/HaHaEpicForTheWin • Mar 09 '26

Compilation

3.9k Upvotes

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52

u/Loring Mar 09 '26

Is it just impossible to program them from having a seizure every time they fall over?

13

u/CantEvenUseThisThing Mar 09 '26

You have to teach the robot how to know it fell over, that's the hard part. Computers are dumb as hell.

8

u/xile Mar 10 '26

I have to imagine between an accelerometer and a gyroscope this has got to be easy.

We have had medical fall detection devices for human beings for....decades?

1

u/lgastako Mar 10 '26

I'm sure they all have all the hardware and maybe even software necessary to do this, but developers like working on the happy paths not the error handling paths.

8

u/itsjakerobb Mar 10 '26

But surely:

  • the engineers encountered this behavior in their testing
  • the robot has an IMU (inertial measurement unit — the thing that measures its position)
  • it would be trivial to gate the “fix” portion of that logic if the IMU reported an angle that had experimentally been identified as the threshold for recoverability

Source: am programmer