Automate It: A Robotics Podcast
Sep 18, 2026 · 57 min · 11 segments
Two episodes in two weeks! This week's robot invention: a cuttlefish-shaped maintenance drone that has to navigate around a featureless alien sphere at a good fraction of light speed, localizing off…
Stefan Seltz-AxmacherHost
Ilia BaranovHostSo this morning I was reading about an interesting cosmological fact, which is that pulsars all pulse at relatively unique and identifiable frequencies, which means that if you see a couple of them, you can identify where you are.
Like if you see four pulsars, you can identify yourself within a couple of meters of
But I think within the boundaries of sanity, the accuracy you're going to get is like plus or minus a million kilometers in any direction.
If I have four known reference points, and I know where these pulsars are in the cosmological scale, I can look at how big they are and how far away they are.
And I know for a fact it's them because of the fact that they are repeating it a certain way.
I think optics will start to, like physics and optics will start to play a role.
Again, I'm talking a bit beyond my expertise here, but at a certain point, the resolution ability of your lens.
The resolution capability of your lens, there's a Rayleigh limit, which like the amount of resolution or the amount of resolving power you have is proportional to the size of your lens.
Unless you're literally putting a telescope on your robot and not only one telescope, four telescopes.
So this morning I was reading about an interesting cosmological fact, which is that pulsars all pulse at relatively unique and identifiable frequencies, which means that if you see a couple of them, you can identify where you are.
Like if you see four pulsars, you can identify yourself within a couple of meters of
But I think within the boundaries of sanity, the accuracy you're going to get is like plus or minus a million kilometers in any direction.
If I have four known reference points, and I know where these pulsars are in the cosmological scale, I can look at how big they are and how far away they are.
And I know for a fact it's them because of the fact that they are repeating it a certain way.
I think optics will start to, like physics and optics will start to play a role.
Again, I'm talking a bit beyond my expertise here, but at a certain point, the resolution ability of your lens.
The resolution capability of your lens, there's a Rayleigh limit, which like the amount of resolution or the amount of resolving power you have is proportional to the size of your lens.
Unless you're literally putting a telescope on your robot and not only one telescope, four telescopes.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
