Robot + Coaster = Robocoaster!

Posted 12 Jun 2003 at 02:20 UTC by The Swirling Brain

Tech TV has an article about the first robotic amusement park ride called Robocoaster. Remember the movie The Iron Giant where the boy got a ride in the car courtesy of the big robot? That's sort of what this is. You get in it and a big robotic arm whooses you around. Very cool. It's a scary 30 foot tall and 8000 pounds, but what's more scary than that? Well, it's run by Windows. No foolin! ... pause a few seconds and introspect ... Now if you were brave enough, you could have gotten a ride at the International Robots & Vision Show in Chicago. Did anyone in Chicago get to ride it?

Blue Screen of Death, posted 12 Jun 2003 at 20:48 UTC by earlwb » (Master)

Well that'll work until the get the famous "Blue Screen of Death", then it'll be all over even before the fat lady sings.

Using Windows , posted 12 Jun 2003 at 21:30 UTC by steve » (Master)

It always boggles my mind that anyone would seriously consider using Microsoft software in a potentially life-or-death situation, much less in a mission-critical application. Remember that Navy ship a while back that went dead in the water due to MS Windows bugs?

Splat!, posted 13 Jun 2003 at 01:25 UTC by The Swirling Brain » (Master)

Perhaps it also simulates bungie jumping?

I can't beleive...., posted 13 Jun 2003 at 02:12 UTC by earlwb » (Master)

The Yorktown propulsion system crashed when someone entered a zero in a data field.... I can't beleive they had such incompetent programmers that couldn't add some simple "IF" statements to prevent a zero value from causing a "divide by zero" error condition. Like that is taught in the entry level programming courses even. Of course I could be wrong, there sure seems to be a lot of incompetent programmers around nowadays. Maybe they don't teach such things anymore.