Search and Rescue Robot
                          Bill Nye
                         03/29/2009

More and more, robots are being used to search for people trapped after
a disaster.  This projects presents a Flash animation of a robot that is
placed into a dark area to search for and rescue trapped victims.  The robot
must be controlled by an external operator, that sees on a projected screen
the view from an imaginary camera above the search robot.

Whereas the animated robot could easily be controlled by mouse or
joystick, in this project a REAL Robosapien robot's position is tracked
by a REAL webcam attached to a pvc-pipe structure.  The position of the
Robosapien is used to position the animated robot on the screen.

The use of this REAL robot has two purposes:
  1. To limit the positioning of the on-screen animated robot
     to be no faster than it would with a real robot.
  2. To provide more fun for kids (and grownups too).

The user interface is the simplest possible.  You control the Robosapien
in the standard way with its left/right/forward/back IR controller,
while continually observing the projected screen.  When you pause
(stop moving) over a victim, he or she gets picked up automatically.
Similarly if you pause while carrying a victim, he or she gets put down.
The goal is to pick up victims and bring them over the side, where they
get taken away.

We hope to give users the joy of saving victims by manipulating a robot
in an (animated) inaccessible and dangerous area.  Additionally, users
may learn a little about camera-tracking of the Robosapien.

A possible side benefit is that the project animation, including the webcam
red/green tracking, is written entirely in Flash Actionscript. Thus, it
*may* be possible for kids to later play the game in a browser at home,
with their computer webcam, by tracking a bright red and green object ... or
by tracking their own actual robot if they fit red and green balloons over
its hands (like this project does).