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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.

4 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.

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      Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
  2. 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)).