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Transforming a Laptop into a Robot
NathanZ writes "Evolution Robotics is selling what looks like a docking station on wheels as a way to transform a laptop into a robot. I'm not exactly sure how this can be useful since the "robot" has no arms. According to their website, "you can train your robot to do things like recognize objects and places, send email, take pictures and video, respond to voice commands, and more!". Yipee. At least it would give me something to do with that old Toshiba laptop sitting in the closet."
finally my plans for an evil army of robots ar becoming complete! the world will be mine! Muhahahahah!!
;-)
the chicks will certanly dig it
[out of keyboard] Form feet and legs!
[out of display] Form arms and body!
[out of Windows XP] And I'll form the head!
[Robot's body shortly turns blue with white lettering crawling around it like an obscene electronic text ticker, and falls on its side ala the Dirty Old Man from Laugh-In.]
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Wouldn't voice recognition be better than a visual system for commands? I'd rather say "Play U2" than have to fetch a U2 CD to wave in front of its face for it to play music. And since you have to train it anyway by showing it various objects, it just seems like voice recognition would've been the smarter route.
While the beer routine made a good demonstration, Gross said he expects the system to have many useful real-world applications.
I don't need it any more useful than that.
Come to think of it, is there anything more useful for a laptop-on-a-trolley to do?
(Remember, it has no arms - hang on, how did it fetch my beer?)
--
(if you're still looking for the point, it was back there, in the post. </sig>)
is sell them on automotive performance boards.....it doesnt take much to run the tuning software. well, unless programming a smart "battle bot" seems appealing to you ...
I would definitely build one of these things and epoxy a bong holder, nug jar, and lighter holder to it. Then I would never have to leave the couch again. Well, 'cept to use the bathroom...
"HAL, come get your daddy high". Yep.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
From the webpage:
Requirements for your laptop
(Not included with purchase)
Windows 98 or higher
Pentium II - 800 MHz or faster
256 MB RAM
50MB Hard disk space
2 USB ports
(directly on laptop or via hub
SONY. Because caucasians are just too damn tall.
And I just gave my old laptop to a teacher, what was I thinking?! Instead of using technology to help someone help kids I could have been using it as a roving email station or another piece of hardware to yell at when it breaks or doesn't work properly.
My amd bot will kick your intel bot up and down the street. Now a beowulf cluster of these would certainly be a party. Droves of robots armed with 802.11 roaming around bumping into each other. It's a far cry from the matrix but we can teach them to be evil!
Then you'll have your family & friends worring about the increase in daily spam intake :-)
I'm not exactly sure how this can be useful since the "robot" has no arms.
Why do so many people have this misconception that a robot has to be humanoid, or have mechanical appendages. A robot is simply any machine that performs tasks automatically. A record player is a robot. A printer is a robot. 'cron' could even be classed as a logical robot.
Of course a robot can be useful without arms!
Well, if the wheeled base is connected via USB and has a control pannel, then a USB arm seems just as possible. Not that I could do it, though.
Put arms on it! Send it to pick up the paper and pick up dog crap. That's what robots are for.
The RDK (Robot Development Kit) page says you can get a laptop preconfigured to run this thing. The laptop runs "Standard Red Hat 7.2". Cool!
The thing has loads of sensors: Video input, Sound input, 9 infrared sensor and 4 bump sensors.
Wonder if the hardware interface has an open spec? Again, not that I could do anything with it. Not for a while.
This is incredibly cool.
Software Wars
I'm not exactly sure how this can be useful since the "robot" has no arms.
How about R2-D2? Sure, he has little tools for welding and grabbing sausages from Yoda, but he doesn't have any really useful arms. Most of his best roles were acting as a big mobile laptop that could help navigate spaceships and hack into the Death Star. As well as provding some comic relief. I bet he could play MP3's too.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
Holy fark, this doesn't sound like a "spare" laptop to me! I was looking forward to running it on my old 200Mhz laptop that I use to check email, etc when on the road. Plus, the USB requirement nixes my idea too. The laptop will never have USB (I've tried) since it's an older-style laptop and does not run CardBus cards.
Pshaw. I'll go buy two Lego Mindstorm kits for the same price and do it myself...
Sounds like the ultimate bachelors tool to me:
-you can train it to get you a new beer (with the robot arm), doesn't need any explanation.
-you can train it to recognize places and objects: really handy if you drank too much of those beers. "where the hell is my bedroom? - please follow me sir.." or "what's the name of the broad in my bedroom?"
-you can have it send email: "send got sick excuse email #34 to work"
-you can have it play mp3's: it can also recognize people, combine those two and next time a skirt walks into your place it'll start playing your 70s-sweet-luvvin' mp3's (already did that, just clap my hands twice to start it)
basicly it can do a lot of things a girlfriend can do, some people will find this highly argueable and they will come up with things like sex and stuff. Well I suspect you can have handsfree pr0n-session with the thing as well. (Or with the thing and your girlfriend at the same time and even record at the same moment).
A seeing robot could be a useful companion for a blind person, for example, or a sophisticated security camera.
Finally someone thinking of those poor, lonely security cameras. It breaks my heart, I'm telling you.
Pokéthulhu
Gotta catch you all!
...not to speak the series of 7 imprinting words to your laptop robot.
It may become irrevocably attached to you, and begin following you around the house or office like a lost puppy dog.
You have an older Toshiba laptop sitting in your closet and the best thing you can think of to do w/it is make a robot out of it?
;-)
You will not only have a Toshiba laptop in your closet, you will also have this robot as well.
My roommate and I use our laptops as wireless web machines and MP3 servers to the stereo, that's the most selfish way to use an old laptop, obviously giving it away would be even better.
Geeks and their toys, sheesh
Forget "video capture resolution."
The specs _I_ want to know are: how thick a rug can it run on? Can it go over a 3/4"-high threshold? How is it at navigating obstacles? How resistant to floor dirt is it (hint: some of us have Newfoundland dogs, they shed, the hair is long enough to wind around a vacuum cleaner beater bar and jam it...)?
What about stair-climbing?
Looks like it's only useful in a space that has a single, flat, clean floor. How many readers live in a space that fits that description?
Now, as a way of ferrying parts around a factory floor like those big "Pronto" systems...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Dont need to lug my ol heavy laptop now.
I'll just train it to recognize and follow me to work.
Yipee. At least it would give me something to do with that old Toshiba laptop sitting in the closet.
Wait, you have an old PII-800mhz(or better) laptop laying in your closet unused? Can I have it? I don't have a laptop and that's plenty fast for me to get REAL work done on it.
Or donate it to your local highschool, I'm sure they have teachers there that could use that well equiped of a laptop for REAL work too. My aunt is a teacher in a public school and would have constant use for a laptop like that.
Sorry for the rant..
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
With the camera attachment, you can have it be a web-cam of people looking at goatse guy. Put it out on the sidewalk and the fun ensues!
This is a joke right? I've been building / designing robots for years. First of all Microsoft Windows isn't the OS of choice for robotics. I use a handyboard (http://www.handyboard.com), for one robot, a embedded controller running Linux for another robot, and a 68332 controller for yet another design. I use Linux to develop code for all three, and the embedded controller also run Linux as it's OS. The other two robots make use of Linux for code generation (GCC for the 68332 robot) and IC for the handyboard.
. html but at least that has a holonomic drive system and Infrared Proximitty detection. I just
You need lots of Digital IO and lots of A/D and D/A ports if you want to build a real robot. I've
got sonar, and I'm going to use the CMU cam for vision recognition (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~cmucam/). The embedded controller based robot also as a wireless 802.11b connection to my home LAN.
I wouldn't spend $599.00 for a robotic base that hooks up to a lpatop. I am guily of building the CMU pprk robot to be driven by a Palm Pilot http://www.acroname.com/robotics/parts/R91-PPRK-3
wanted to play more with a holonomic drive.
before you spend $599.00 do some research.
My next robotic platform is going to use the
Power wheels Wild thing as a base. I'll be taken a dremel tool to the toy. It will also use optical encoders to detect wheel position, Polaroid Sonar, IRPD, an embedded PC-104 controller, a homebrew A/D PC 104 card, a hombrew Digital IO card, a homebrew D/A PC104 card, a homebrew TPU card, a homebrew H-Bridge, and a homebrew servo controller. But I will be using the CMU Vision recognition system and DLINK USB->802.11b adapters.
What does it do if someone where to flash it? Do a Google search for pr0n for them?
No sig for you!!
"Yes. It's more than meets the eye. You should see my car outside..."
How about a virus that makes your laptop run away, or attack you in your sleep.
Or a variation on the pyramid money schemes. Pass this email onto ten people and tomorrow morning there will be a thousand laptops on your doorstep.
Bob.
Tech: Hello, Toshiba technical support.
Client: Uhhh, I put my laptop in one of those robot kits. Now its rolling around the house, screaming that its alive and not to "disassemble Johnny five".
CLICK
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
I'm not exactly sure how this can be useful since the "robot" has no arms.
It can still protect the bridge to your house!
"It's only a flesh wound!"
Just have an arm that can extend either a urinal or bedpan. Any self respecting couchbot should be able to dump them out in the toliet and rinse them without mishap. Heck attach a little sprayer nozzle to it so you won't have to mess with TP either. I bet the Japanese would buy this crap up in a heartbeat. (The average japanese is even more gadget crazy than even the most raving Slashdotter. They even try to have more advanced toliets than their neighbors.)
Do you need Energon Cubes to run it?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I'm working on a robot project with the Stupid Fun Club, and we're going to build the Evolution laptop into a much bigger heavier duty robot body, to control it. [These people started the Robot Wars competition, but this particular robot is designed to be peaceful, even friendly and social.] The big friendly robot is still under construction, so I decided to assemble Evolution's cute smaller modular robot to see how it works.
It took an afternoon to put together the lego-like parts to build the Evolution robot kit. It included a bunch of aluminum beams, lots of ingenious modular plastic connectors, nuts and bolts, wheels and motors, bump and IR distance sensors, and some awesome ultra-heavy-duty velcro.
The IR distance sensors were somewhat tricky to attach, had flakey connectors, and don't all work; but everything else was quite straightforward and easy. I haven't had so much fun with legos in years!
We're using a laptop recommended and preconfigured by Evolution: an IBM Thinkpad type 2612-1bu. Most interesting is the software, which runs on Linux. Evolution has developed a "robotic operating system", which is written in C++ and configured with XML.
It has a visual behavior programming language for connecting together boxes (representing software behavior modules) with wires (representing data types of input and output parameters).
It's kind of like the "SimAntics" language used to program The Sims, but much simpler, more general purpose, and extensible.
The behavior modules are implemented in C++ and compiled into dynamically linked libraries or built into the application. There's a C++ SDK for programming your own behavior modules, with which I've just started experimenting.
XML schema files describe the module interfaces (name, description, library, symbol, parameters, input and output ports with data types, etc). They're not standard XML-Schema, just Evolution's own special purpose behavior schema format, which is appropriate for the task.
XML behavior files assemble a bunch of modules and connect them together into high level behavior networks, which you can use to build even higher level behavior networks in a modular fashion.
There's a visual programming tool implemented in Java that lets you graphically construct networks of behavior modules, or you can simply type them in as XML in a text editor.
Unfortunately the behavior construction tool isn't integrated with the behavior execution engine, so you have to run them separately, so you can't actually edit the behaviors in place while they're running.
Other visual programming languages like SimAntics and Bounce let you edit live programs while they are running, which is extremely useful.
The software side of the Evolution robotics kit includes modules for voice synthesis and voice recognition (IBM's ViaVoice libraries), as well as video capture, some simple image processing, sensor reading, motor control, network communication, teleoperation, a simple emotion engine and animated human face, and a bunch of other stuff.
But unfortunately the source code for many of the interesting modules is not included, so if they don't do exactly what you want you have to replace them from scratch.
For example, the human face emotion animation module doesn't support texture mapped faces. That's fine if your robot's face is Kermit the Frog, but I want to use face skins from The Sims. If Evolution decided to include more module source code with the SDK, programmers would be able to customize it more easily, instead of reinventing the wheel.
In summary, I like Evolution's modern and open architecture, and the code that I've seen so far is quite well designed and nicely written. But I'd like to see more code, please! One of the big problems in robotics is smoothly integrating many different pieces of software and hardware, and I think they've taken a good approach to that problem. Now they have to enable developers to easily integrate many different software and hardware modules, and let them all fight it out.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
They'll have credit card swipers, bill and coin slots, and even cigarettes dispensers.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
http://www.intel.com/research/mrl/research/opencv
-Don
====
This library is mainly aimed at real time computer vision. Some example areas would be Human-Computer Interaction (HCI); Object Identification, Segmentation and Recognition; Face Recognition; Gesture Recognition; Motion Tracking, Ego Motion, Motion Understanding; Structure From Motion (SFM); and Mobile Robotics.
Library Areas:
The areas covered by this library are
Chapter Contents
Image functions: Creation, allocation, destruction of images. Fast pixel access macros.
Data Structures: Static types and dynamic storage. Contour Processing: Finding, displaying, manipulation, and simplification of image contours.
Geometry: Line and ellipse fitting. Convex hull. Contour analysis.
Features: 1st & 2nd Image Derivatives. Lines: Canny, Hough. Corners: Finding, tracking.
Image Statistics: In region of interest: Count, Mean, STD, Min, Max, Norm, Moments, Hu Moments.
Image Pyramids: Power of 2. Color/texture segmentation.
Morphology: Erode, dilate, open, close. Gradient, top-hat, black-hat.
Background Differencing: Accumulate images and squared images. Running averages.
Distance Transform: Distance Transform Thresholding Binary, inverse binary, truncated, to zero, to zero inverse.
Flood Fill: 4 and 8 connected
Camera Calibration: Intrinsic and extrinsic, Rodrigues, un-distortion, Finding checkerboard calibration pattern
View Morphing: 8 point algorithm, Epipolar alignment of images
Motion Templates: Overlaying silhouettes: motion history image, gradient and weighted global motion.
CAMSHIFT: Mean shift algorithm and variant
Active Contours: Snakes
Optical Flow: HS, L-K, BM and L-K in pyramid.
Estimators: Kalman and Condensation.
POSIT: 6DOF model based estimate from 1 2D view.
Histogram (recognition): Manipulation, comparison, backprojection. Earth Mover's Distance (EMD).
Gesture Recognition: Stereo based: Finding hand, hand mask. Image homography, bounding box.
Matrix: Matrix Math: SVD, inverse, cross-product, Mahalanobis, eigen values and vectors. Perspective projection.
Eigen Objects: Calc Cov Matrix, Calc Eigen objects, decomp. coeffs. Decomposition and projection.
embedded HMMs: Create, destroy, observation vectors, DCT, Viterbi Segmentation, training and test.
Drawing Primatives: Line, rectangle, circle, ellipse, polygon. Text on images.
System Functions: Load optimized code. Get processor info.
Utility: Abs difference. Template matching. Pixel order<->Plane order. Convert Scale. Sampling lines. Bi-linear interpolation. ArcTan, sqrt, inv-sqrt, reciprocal. CartToPolar, Exp, Log. Random numbs. Set image. K-Means.
Intel® Image Processing Library (included in OpenCV WinOS download):
Image creation and access (same image header used for both libraries).
Image arithmetic and logic operations.
Image filtering.
Linear image transformation.
Image morphology.
Color space conversion.
Image histogram and thresholding.
Geometric transformation (zoom-decimate, rotate, mirror, shear, warp, perspective transform, affine transform).
Image moments.
Demo Overview (apps that come with the library)
Matlab Camera Calibration Toolbox tutorial
Automatic camera calibration filter
Color tracker/face tracker
Condensation filter fracker
Face recognition using embedded HMMs
Kalman filter tracker
Lucas-Kanade optical flow in an image pyramid
User Contributed Utilities
Windows* Specific
How to find any Direct Show* camera driver with the CAMSHIFT demo
Matrox Meteor* Direct Show capture filter
Linux* Specific
C Code, Non-Specific
BMP* to IPL file reader/writer
Finding the mean and covariance of data sets on disk
====
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
I wonder if it would be easier to get a computer to understand some form of sign language than try and parse human speech... I'd rather sign out "Play" "U2" than have it randomly start playing odd things because of background noise. Remember the article on phantom Windows actions resulting from random noise picked up over an empty MIC port?
I think Star Trek had a good approach to voice commands though, they always had to prefix commands with "Computer" to let the computer know when to pay attention.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley