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Small-Scale Warrior Robot Truck

Posted by timothy on from the going-to-sue-over-that-name dept.

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.

9 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Mine is way better by Hayzeus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

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    Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
    1. Re:Mine is way better by Hayzeus · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's been submitted by a few people, but deemed insufficiently interesting by the editors. The slashdotting would be interesting -- would the wheels go before the internet connection?

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      Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
    2. Re:Mine is way better by Hayzeus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I can now report that the wheels indeed went (several times) before the internet connection, which has yet to go.

      --

      Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
  2. Reminds me of my childhood by porn*! · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  3. Co-operation? by jukal · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)).

  4. Video at the expense of navigation by sssmashy · · Score: 3, Interesting
    ...if the Timbot needs to perform expensive calculations to ensure that it avoids an obstacle, then it can slow down and reduce the amount of time that it spends processing video. Once it is past the obstacle, Timbot can reallocate its resources, increasing the quality of the video images that it transmits, and moving faster again...

    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.

  5. Open Source.... by Tsali · · Score: 2, Interesting

    haiku

    Sure, it runs Linux,
    But will their interop sys
    be open source? I hope!

    /haiku

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    This space for rent.
  6. Re:Mods, get out those Redundant points.. by tramm · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Anonvmous Coward says:
    - It's running Linux! That's great! This means that people will be able to reprogram it! [...] - Wow, imagine the cool things you could do with this! [...] 2.) Use Linux as the OS [...] 3.) Place sensors on them [...] 4.) Support 802.11
    Even better than a car is a helicopter. It meets all of those requirements, and more! We're using an onboard Linux iPAQ running GPLed flight control software that communicates its sensor telemetry over 802.11 to a Linux groundstation.

    Current sensors are six degree of freedom, three axis gyros and accelerometers, a GPS, sonar and a two axis magnetometer (compass).

    We're still workin gon the cool things you could do with it. Send in your ideas...

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    -- http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/
  7. New Slashdot category by Earlybird · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Could we invent a new Slashdot category, please? Call it Toys for Boys.