Nobody has seen every single lamp there is. But in most cases, we can walk into someone’s house for the first time and easily identify all their lamps and how they work. Every once in a while, of course, there will be something incredibly weird that’ll cause you to have to ask, “Uh, is that a lamp? How do I turn it on?” But most of the time, our generalized mental model of lamps keeps us out of trouble.
It’s helpful that lamps, along with other categories of objects, have (by definition) lots of pieces in common with each other. Lamps usually have bulbs in them. They often have shades. There’s probably also a base to keep it from falling over, a body to get it off the ground, and a power cord. If you see something with all of those characteristics, it’s probably a lamp, and once you know that, you can make educated guesses about how to usefully interact with it.
This level of understanding is something that robots tend to be particularly bad at, which is a real shame because of how useful it is. You might even argue that robots will have to understand objects on a level close to this if we’re ever going to trust them to operate autonomously in unstructured environments. At the 2019 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) this week, a group of researchers from Stanford, UCSD, SFU, and Intel are announcing PartNet, a huge database of common 3D objects that are broken down and annotated at the level required to, they hope, teach a robot exactly what a lamp is.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
