It is a very interestimg field, but as a self-taught programmer I'm used to learning by building things, and it's hard for me to come up with some project that would be practically useful and yet doable.
Does anyone have any ideas?
The state of hobbyist robotics is very hardware-centric. I not yet discovered something appropriate for use by AI programmers.
So I decided to step back and work on theory. I did this for several years and recently finished. Hobbyist robots still aren't ready to implement my ideas so now what do I do? I started working on a software architecture based on my high-level research. But how to test it? So now I am working on software to simulate an environment for my AI to interact with because I don't have the time or skill to build a real robot.
I honestly don't think this is a bad thing because I would imagine that when we start to work on "real" AI (not this nonsense that passes for it today) testing behaviors in a simulated environment before deployment to hardware would save a huge amount of time (and physical damage.)
Now I am hoping that once I have taken my virtual habitat as far as it can go, hardware will be available for me to apply what I have been working on. My hopes are low.
Mindstorms are really easy to get started with if you want more control over what the robot will look like, but you'll be facing more mechanical engineering problems.
diydrones has a lot of good information about getting things connected. Most people look to RC cars because they're so inexpensive.
So, the big thing with hardware is it kind of sucks. It always feels like using a butterknife to tighten screws. Things are challenging in ways you don't expect. With software, if you make a mistake, you fix it and recompile. With hardware, you hope nothing breaks.
I too wish it were easy. It's not, it's complicated in ways that suck. If you have money to throw at the problem, i bet you can find a nice industrial platform that's built like a tank that has a nice API. That kind of stuff is thousands of dollars, and i'm not familiar with it.
- Sports: Predict game outcomes, player performance. Make money playing fantasy sports?
- Real estate: Build a better tool for house assessments that identifies "comps" and predicts what the house should cost.
- Astronomy: Something about exoplanets?
- Amazon prices: Find opportunities to buy/sell.
- Stock prices: Inputs are news/Twitter, outputs are predictions of closing price.
I'd start with your hobbies and go from there!
This might sound a little uninspiring, but it's a solid start, and often you can make improvements over the authors' original stuff -- especially in areas where you may have more experience, e.g. computational efficiency.