JavaOne Keynote: Paul Perrone Presents on AVTS

The world’s top Java software engineers were awed by live demonstrations of the AVTS at the 2014 JavaOne conference and a presentation on how Perrone Robotics is testing ADAS and safety features in vehicles. Paul Perrone showed off the Drop-in Actuator Kit (DAK) and a pedestrian-sized AVTS Target Robot platform and showed a brief video of the full AVTS system in action at an automotive safety testing institute.Paul started off discussing how Perrone Robotics is helping test safety technologies in new vehicles and gave live demos of AVTS components. We didn’t bring the full-sized Target Robot out to San Francisco, but we did have a pedestrian-sized version zipping across the stage. Rather than install the DAK into a car, we used it to control the steering wheel and brake and throttle pedals of a Thrustmaster T500 RS game controller system (yes, that’s the real name of the product) connected to a Playstation 3. It was purely for comedic effect since we didn’t have any feedback of what was happening on the screen and we just had the DAK drive randomly. We got a few laughs when Paul explained that our system can now be used to address the problem of how many of us waste so many productive hours playing video games — now we have a robotic solution to do that for you!