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Small-Scale Warrior Robot Truck
Phoebus0 writes "The Oregon Health and Science University's Department of Computer Science and Engineering has been developing what looks like a massive robot truck of the future - only on a slightly smaller scale. It appears to use some fairly cool stuff on a really small platform, literally. It's called the Timbot, and is supposed to be able to act and get around independently, with only high-level instructions. The robot is running embedded Linux with 802.11b ethernet, a micro pan/tilt camera, and a bunch of other sensors. It's partially funded by DARPA, and the current press release can be found here. I want one!" I hope they commericialize and sell this, looks much better than my old Tonka truck.
I know it looks more like an rc truck, but with a name like "Timbot", I just picture a wheel-chair-looking robot bumping into walls all the time shouting "Timmay! ... Timmay!"
If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
that robot warrior truck sure is small!
The movie "Flash" ?
well if they commercialized it, it would probably be way too expensive for the average user.
Confucious says: Man who runs behind car gets exhausted.
// jeku.com
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
</biting-sarcasm>
...it'll keep fighting for the glory of the regiment.
Go read Bolo again, please!
If they can get it to brew a pot of coffee, we can fire half the employees at my office, yay!
"...more and more of our imports come from overseas." - G.W. Bush
Doesn't anyone care about all the Redneck, Snaggle Toothed Monster Truck drivers who will be out of a job when Monster Truck Rallies are no longer Human Operated. In the year 2000, all monster trucks will be controlled by Slashdot Techies using Remote Controls.
What is this World Coming To!
Wow..
So much cooler than my old BigTrax that I used to spend oodles of time coding up to run around my house and drop legos and such.
Now what I need is one of these and one of those new vacume bots that will clean my house for me. Man just think of the day when we can sit around like the jetsons and have little bots do everything for us.. MMMMMM.. My mouth salivates at the thought of my lazyness.
If I were only smart enough to accomplish the things I dream about.. Or maybe too dumb to care.
Mine can be controlled from the web as well, has a snappier paint job, and implements "graceful degradation" every few days when it looses a wheel. See the sig...
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
You must have REALLY been hard on your toys!
But in order for the Timbot to "make it" on the open market, they're DEFINATELY going to need to do some marketing
But I don't think this toy would last half as long as your Tonka truck did in its current state
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
This thing reminds me of this funky toy truck I had as a kid. You could program it to perform basic movements and navigation. It also had a little cargo carrier that it towed. Was it called Bigfoot? can't remember. Either way I'm pretty sure DARPA didn't finance it.
I didn't get much of the main page before it was slashdotted, but i do recognize a Traxxas E-Maxx in there somewhere.
I've got the nitro version, a T-Maxx.. Incredible fun.
Are there records kept for the amount of time the typical Slashdot victim-server lives after being posted?
That might make in interesting resarch project.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.
Wireless 802.11b ethernet???
It's already outdated now that 802.11a is out.
Small Scale Warrior Robot Trucks Blamed.
What's next?
By the way, anybody else remember Megaweapon from "Warrior of the Lost World" with that guy from "The Paper Chase" and Persis Khambata? Now there was a robot truck!
Does that make it a normal sized truck?
smaller massive?
Isn't that like jumbo shrimp?
TODO: Something witty here...
Let's see....robot + truck...
= REAL LIFE TRANSFORMERS!
Cool. My very own Optimus Prime. How much?
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
So if this thing is only supposed to scurry about and collect twigs and such.. why does part of its name entail "Warrior"? Do rocket launchers unfold when it hits american soil?
I bet this is Osamas newest theme for world terror. New York beware, Stick-Collecting T-1000's should appear on shelves near you.. as soon as the afghan war donkeys learn how to swim and get the merchendise here. Rawr.
i thought it was running XP. :/
:p
ps, imagine a 'beovulf' of these...
It seems that plenty of these robot projects are now beginning to be able "to act and get around independently" - atleast for specific purposes. But is there projects that would have looked at this from the different "ant" perspective. I mean, that the bots would build a co-operative network and use distributed intelligence to achieve the task most efficient possible way. I don't know anything about the matter - but I would think that the 2nd does not need the first - ie. we would not need to have a robot that can work independently before we can have many robots than can work co-operatively. (Just think about your local nerd, but him near computer - great, make him decide what to eat or come to a meeting in time (core dump) - with co-operation he/she might actually achieve these tasks)).
I mirrored the entire story from http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~mpj/timbot/index.html before it got /.'ed.
t / for the full article and pics.
Go to http://hosting.coldfirestudios.com/slashdot/timbo
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Okay, I'm going to render a bunch of future posts Redundant. Moderators, your job is to read my post, then go down the line and mod the following ones down as -1, Redundant. Ready?
- It's running Linux! That's great! This means that people will be able to reprogram it!
- Good thing it's not running Windows, then the truck would crash. *Giggle giggle snort snort.*
- Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these!
- Why would anybody want something like this? All it is is a lump of plastic and some computery bits.
- Wow, imagine the cool things you could do with this!
- 1.) Make Robotic Cars, 2.) Use Linux as the OS, 3.) Place sensors on them, 4.) Support 802.11, 5.) ????, 6.) Profit!!!
- Heh, it'd be funny if I used this in a bizarre way.
- Oh c'mon, the site's already Slashdotted? Good thing I'm around to let other people know!
There, now you loot know what has already been said. Now you can think about a more interesting point to make!
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XP Embedded would have been a MUCH better choice. Who wants to pay for embedded Linux?
The Timbot has enough to think about... why waste its precious processor resources on a video feed? The Timbot doesn't need video to get around. It could rely entirely on its sonar, plus a simple still picture every second or so for the visual analysis algorithms.
To get that cool "first-person" footage of the Timbot moving around, slap an XCam on top of it. Meanwhile, focus on sonar (and possibly even lidar?) for the navigation systems.
Phase 1. Imagine a 'beovulf' of these.
Phase 2. ???
Phase 3. Profit.
how the heck do you warchalk a moving access point????
Someone needs to go out and start printing the bumper stickers now... "Public 802.11 on board"
And police cars with 802.11 would be what then? "Honey tankers"?
-jon
I built the first two versions of this project, originally called "OGI'maBot", while I worked at the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI). The first was a laptop on a trailer behind a manually controlled RC car. The second, OGI'maBot2, was an AT motherboard on top of a rally-truck RC chassis. The most expensive single part was the power converter to run the motherboard. The "TimBot" is the 4th iteration of the project AFAICT, the third one being somewhere in between.
;-)
You can get more info on the 2nd generation at http://www.omegacs.net/~omega/ogimabot2/, but please be kind, it's my home DSL line.
The software was very cool, the infrastructure directly led to the GStreamer project that I started while working there. I guess I should go back out there soon and have a closer look at this thing
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
haiku
/haiku
Sure, it runs Linux,
But will their interop sys
be open source? I hope!
This space for rent.
Are you from Canada? 'cause I hear they're slow there.
Wireless etherent?
Hello IP Spoofing...
Funded by DARPA = Eventual military use for this...
So what exactly is this for, remotely wardriving in Afganistan?
Hmm... people get PAID to do that kind of work? Quick! where do I send my resume?? I have lots of ideas to spend^H^H^H^H^H research on.
-- Leeeter than leet
Actually, I should have been more specific: it looks better in *capabilities* than my old Tonka truck, which got lost in some move probably 20 years ago ... Tonka stuff looks good, is built correctly, but has no camera, programmability.
:) However, my elder brother created some sort of goo -- by mixing things from the completely unsafe under-the-kitchen-counter chemical lab -- which managed to *wrinkle* part of the surface on my Tonka. I was mad, but I was also impressed, and even more so in retrospect. What chemicals under the sink would wrinkle that %$#@ tough metal?!
Interesting note: Tonka toys are hard to destruct, as you see aware
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Id be interested to know what OD they are using. I work with PC/104 stack for embedded use, and we run QNX. Since they use a "high level" language I wonder what the base platform is? Is Timber just a wrapper?
Harder.. Better.. Faster.. Stronger
It's called the Square Master. You see, the Square Master allows you to maximize your human potential because Square Master uses one of nature's most perfect shapes for your perfect shape.
Joel: Let Bitter Sweethearts do it. Like, this one says GET OUT.
Crow: OWIE OWIE OWIE.
Servo: LOVE ME.
Joel: STILL MAD.
Crow: MY NEEDS.
Servo: Oh, here we go. BITE ME.
Joel: DROP HIM.
Crow: I'M TESTED.
Servo: THAT HAIR.
Joel: CAN'T LEAVE THE COUNTY.
Crow: Perfect for interventions, counseling sessions, or awkward dating situations!
Servo: Look at this. WEIRD FACE.
Joel: YOU'LL DO.
Crow: LIKE A BROTHER.
I'd go into the Taj Mahal in my minibike and just spin donuts!
If it is called the timbot, is it written in Python?
Does this have anything to to with timbits? Mini-Robo-Trucks, Mini-Donut-Parts?
Timbot could be used to bring wardriving to a whole new level...
TIIIMBOTTTT! Livin' a lie, livin' a lie, TIMMMBOTT!!!
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
omfg, you got owned faggit troll. lol.
I think those Oregonic Sci-gnomes are taking the term 'War Driving' a little to literally.
However, I wonder if their research would extend to such ventures, even if those activities are comparatively inconsequential to smaller sized rc vehicles.
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
"So what exactly is this for, remotely wardriving in Afganistan?" There is certaibly a military requirement to have a look at areas that may have been subjected to NBC (Nuclear,Bilogical,Chemical) contamination without putting personnell at risk. A large RC vehicle was (still is?) used to measure radiation levels inside the remains of the facility at Chernobyl. Similar technology is also in use today by bomb squads.
The ICFP Programming Contest results just came out...and what happens? Same server gets slashdotted to hell...
check it out if you can:
http://icfpcontest.cse.ogi.edu/scoring/
Your signatures belong to me.
Gack.
Thanks guys. That's our server you've slashdotted.
Took us a 15 minutes to figure out why to load was hovering over 5 with 150 httpds running. Since it also handles our imap stuff..... no email for us!
I just happened to visit slashdot in frustration (don't we all?) and noticed the Timbot stuff on the front page. Mystery solved.
Maybe I'll got across the hall and tell the Timbot guy why his email is not working right now, or I'll just sit here and wait it out.
The server has 12 85MHz procs & 1.5 Gigs of ram. It is a big, literally the size of a fridge, older Sun server.
I just wish I had a picture of the thing to link to. Big monster, huge slashdotting. Slashdot wins again.
*sigh*
--Azimir
Reminds me of the projects people bring to the Homebrew Robotics Club
http://www.hbrobotics.org/
For some unknown reason Timbot gives strange warnings about rabbits.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Labeling that post as funny is just salt in the wound.
Aren't we all a bunch of mother fucking shit-heads?
Why yes we are.
...exists to channel Guido.
http://travis.servebeer.com/volvo
(remote control not included)
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
No hippies could stop a beowulf cluster of these!
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
*BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!*
Some call me... Tim!!
-jokerghost
Oregon Colleges don't prepare students for the real world, they are almost completely worthless in terms of practical education. This state is so bad that it has the HIGHEST unemployment rate in the country, and it rains all the time. The chicks look like dogs, and are fat as cows. If only I could afford to leave this dump...
TRANSFORM!
Mount a Pringle's can on top of it and imagine the possibilities!
Imagine a beow... oh never mind..
-Laz
Could we invent a new Slashdot category, please? Call it Toys for Boys.
You have an S2000? Haven't seen one of those antiques in years. :) It probably has about the same horsepower as a nice new dual-pentium box - sic transit gloria moorea. Or something.
KILL ALL PAKIS!