Slashdot Mirror

Extremely specialized robots already exist. Meet the Assembly robot http://www.robots.com/applications.php?app=robotic+assembly

Electronic Equipment Service and Repair seemed like such a good idea for a small business back when personal cd players where made of metal with windows made of plexi (sp?) glass. Oh how the times have changed....and relatively quickly too.

Skip consumer products. Go industrial. The servo systems are the same. The automation is the same. The hardware is bigger and networked. This isn't the cheap stuff. It still pays to maintain these.

http://www.asyst.com/products/fsol/amhs/sahms.asp
http://www.robots.com/
http://www.robots.com/parts.php

They still are made of mechanical parts that wear and go out of tolerance. They need mechanical parts changed and repaired. They need tested to see if they are within specifications for placement accuracy. It's good work and these are rarely simply trashed instead of repaired.

Electronic Equipment Service and Repair seemed like such a good idea for a small business back when personal cd players where made of metal with windows made of plexi (sp?) glass. Oh how the times have changed....and relatively quickly too.

Skip consumer products. Go industrial. The servo systems are the same. The automation is the same. The hardware is bigger and networked. This isn't the cheap stuff. It still pays to maintain these.

http://www.asyst.com/products/fsol/amhs/sahms.asp
http://www.robots.com/
http://www.robots.com/parts.php

They still are made of mechanical parts that wear and go out of tolerance. They need mechanical parts changed and repaired. They need tested to see if they are within specifications for placement accuracy. It's good work and these are rarely simply trashed instead of repaired.

We have the source for the driver-- we just don't want to commit the resources to porting it. We have more important things to do than make sure we've got the latest kernel. As long as it's stable, and our code runs on it, we're happy. We've had the robot since '95. I'd say seven years is pretty good for a robot, especially from a company that sold itself to 3com for its wireless products. We're running 2.0.29.
And you're close- we're a university lab, so there's no concern about making money. ;-)

Within robotics, you have CMU's Nomad (first robot with an autonomous scientific discovery... antarctica, atacama desert)

You also had a popular robotic platform known generally as Nomads (from Nomadic Technology). Those are gone now, though they live on in courses and labs.

In this "robot".

In /. for posting this story.

Why?

This has to be the lamest robot "story" on the planet. Similar "security" robots have been built by companies and individuals for years. I remember several companies in the 80's doing this, when robots were the "thing" of the "future".

GPS? Why GPS? A white or black line (or even one done in a flourescent "invisible" paint or something) would be much cheaper for navigation. In a new building, a buried wire under the floor or carpet could be used. Coded tags at doors could further aid navigation (UPC or IR "active" tags).

Nomadic Technologies used to sell research robots with this kind of use in mind (sadly, I just found that they stopped production).

IRobot has a research robot that seems ideal for this as well.

Of course, nothing would beat Odetic's Odex-1 for the "scare" factor in security - too bad this 80's robot never went into production...

Now, homebrew bots - that is where the action is:

Karl Williams seems to have many projects of the type that would make interesting security platforms - or at least something to build off of (mount the vortex cannon or coil gun onto the home drone - yikes!).

This machine might even be better for security - simply because it could be smaller and faster for such a job.

The truth is that there are a lot of homebrew and commercial robots that can easily do what this robot does - probably at a fraction of the cost (actually, some of the commercial bots are quite expensive). There were many robots built in the 80's that were capable as well.

That is the article I want to see. Somehow I was hoping for a two legged chicken walker (not ED-209 sized, but something) patrolling the halls, maybe packing low powered pea shooters for "defense" (actually, one homebrewer managed to build such a robot with a "pea-shooter"-style, multi barrel "gun" - it couldn't hurt you, but it could knock over empty pop cans - I wish I had a link to it - probably do, but it is buried in my link list somewhere deep).

Oh well...

Worldcom - Generation Duh!