Slashdot Mirror
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.
</biting-sarcasm>
shoot. looks like there site is gettings slashdotted. Here is a mirror of the picture.
If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
It is better!!!
:)
... and get a story on /.
Your's is ready to serve Java too
You should apply to DARPA for some grant money!
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snagged a mirror of the video, too. (11.2MB, Mpeg format).
If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
It was called the Big Trak, and I think that's what was used to host the (currently /.ed) website.
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
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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!
Funded by DARPA = Eventual military use for this...
So what exactly is this for, remotely wardriving in Afganistan?
There is a program at known as Future Combat Systems. One of their big things right now is teleoperation technologies. They are looking at a whole school of Unmanned X Vehichles, where X is both arial and ground vehicles. At my work, we've been collaborating with the Mobile Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech, turning a Hummer and some robots known as ATRVs into teleoperated bots. We have been doing this as part of the communications portion of the Future Combat Systems project, to demonstrate an IP based communications network developed by another company. Last week we drove the ATRV from New Jersey while the robot was in Atlanta. The hummer can now be driven over telnet, and probably can be driven over a similar distance (although safty concerns make testing such things a little more difficult, and caused us not to try). We can drive any of the robots by gaming joystick from a computer on the internet, with video latency being the limiting factor. And yes, all ye Linux zelots, all the computers in the project run Linux, except an old PC-104 stack running Dos from a floppy.
One think that I have picked up is that just because DARPA is currently looking at things, it does NOT mean that they are making any of them. DARPA will from time to time fund things like this just to find out what the "Best Effort" of industry is, that way they know exactly what they CAN have made.
To get my email address, add "@mail.gatech.edu" to my slashdot ID.
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods