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.

Comments

TIMMAY!!!

[dildatron]

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!"

Re:TIMMAY!!!

[dildatron]

shoot. looks like there site is gettings slashdotted. Here is a mirror of the picture.

Re:TIMMAY!!!

[dildatron]

snagged a mirror of the video, too. (11.2MB, Mpeg format).

Bad idea

[delta407]

a massive robot truck of the future ... running embedded Linux with 802.11b ethernet

So, wait, we have a massive robot truck controlled by 802.11b? Sounds like a great plan. After all, 802.11b sports Wired Equivalent Privacy, which we all know lives up to its name.

</biting-sarcasm>

Oh the possibilites...

[ElQuesoEsViejo]

If they can get it to brew a pot of coffee, we can fire half the employees at my office, yay!

BigTrax

[DCram]

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.

Re:BigTrax

[OrangeSpyderMan]

What is sad about this is that the more that we integrate robots into our society, the more lazy we will all get, and then all will be fatter.

It's up to you - I want a robot to do all the boring stuff so I can free time to go and ride my bike!

Mine is way better

[Hayzeus]

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...

Re:Mine is way better

[mustangdavis]

It is better!!!

Your's is ready to serve Java too :)

You should apply to DARPA for some grant money!

... and get a story on /.

Re:Mine is way better

[Hayzeus]

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?

Re:Mine is way better

[dildatron]

That is a sweet robot. I hope it recovers from the slashdotting it seems to be getting. Very cool.

Re:Mine is way better

[Hayzeus]

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

Tonka

[mustangdavis]

I hope they commericialize and sell this, looks much better than my old Tonka truck.

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 ... the concept is cool, but that thing is UGLY! You'd think they'd have enough money left in their grant to put a cheesy plastic cover on the top of it ... putting the PC on the board just isn't very stylish. If they really wanted to do it with some style, take a page out of Dr. Emmitt Brown's book and cover it with stainless steal and make it look like a DeLorian!

But I don't think this toy would last half as long as your Tonka truck did in its current state ... we're gonna need titainium!!

Reminds me of my childhood

[porn*!]

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.

Re:Reminds me of my childhood

[teamhasnoi]

It was called the Big Trak, and I think that's what was used to host the (currently /.ed) website.

Slashdotted in six minutes

[HawkinsD]

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.

Is this little vehicle day on /.?

[burgburgburg]

Mini RC cars, mini robot trucks.

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!

Re:Is this little vehicle day on /.?

[doublem]

And now all the MST3K lines form the one time I saw the film are coming to mind.

"Euwww. His tongue is like a side of beef!"

"No, really, you can go. I won't miss you. Please stop kissing me goodbye."

"YES! The megaweapon killed the annoying talking bike!"
"Yeah Megaweapon!"

"How dangerous can it be. At the speed it's going they can just walk away."

Massive Truck, but Smaller Scale?

[SniffleBear]

Does that make it a normal sized truck?

Oxymoron?

[Tyler Eaves]

smaller massive?

Isn't that like jumbo shrimp?

Re:Oxymoron?

[Dr Caleb]

Free Gift?

Hmmm...Nostalgia

[da3dAlus]

Let's see....robot + truck...
= REAL LIFE TRANSFORMERS!

Cool. My very own Optimus Prime. How much?

Co-operation?

[jukal]

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)).

Mirror of full story

[mustangdavis]

I mirrored the entire story from http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~mpj/timbot/index.html before it got /.'ed.

Go to http://hosting.coldfirestudios.com/slashdot/timbot / for the full article and pics.

Video at the expense of navigation

[sssmashy]

...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.

Re:Video at the expense of navigation

[Omega Hacker]

The software for the original OGI'maBot2 (2nd gen, Timbot is 4th) was designed for teleoperation. The software was designed so that tradeoffs could be made between the quality of the video feed and its frame-rate. The tradeoff was based on the current speed of the vehicle, because a fixed frame rate at high speed means you're moving a large distance between frames. The actual contents of the frames don't have to be as sharp, you just need them more often.

The TimBot pushes more into the realm of autonomous vehicles. I suspect it's still using roughly the same code-base (the Quasar pipeline, upon which GStreamer is based, conceptually), so there's still video transmission going on, for failsafe if nothing else. The video is sent over 802.11b because OGI has (and has had for a long time) a campus-wide wireless cloud. This bot can range anywhere around campus, so x10 video doesn't work.

I would be interested to know what their failsafes are, onboard. One time I was driving OGI'maBot2 around several rooms away (took me 5+sec running to get there) when the computer died, leaving the motor running full-speed backwards. It backed *underneath* a desk, destroying an ISA slot on the motherboard (bent over). TimBot is a lot more compact and rugged-looking, but still susceptible.

This raises an entirely new issue...

[jcrb]

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"?

Re:THINK ABOUT THE PEOPLE

[e2d2]

Also in the year 2000 people will find out that the Supreme Court is really just regular court with sour cream and tomatos.

Heh, it's finally a monster truck

[Omega Hacker]

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 ;-)

Open Source....

[Tsali]

haiku

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

/haiku

Re:Open Source....

[_ph1ux_]

your haiku is not
must follow format you see
first five, seven, five.

Re:Open Source....

[spun]

Twice five syllables
Plus seven can't say much, but
That's haiku for you.

I think Douglas Hofstadter(sp? the guy who wrote 'Godel, Escher, Bach') wrote that one. It's my favorite haiku ever.

Re:Mods, get out those Redundant points..

[tramm]

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...

Hmmm....

[mtnharo]

Funded by DARPA = Eventual military use for this...

So what exactly is this for, remotely wardriving in Afganistan?

Re:Hmmm....

[gte910h]

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.

Megaweapon and other Episode 501 quotes

[burgburgburg]

The say Megaweapons one bad motha ...shut your mouth ...I'm just talkin' about Megaweapon

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!

Gratuitous South Park Reference:

[NeuroManson]

TIIIMBOTTTT! Livin' a lie, livin' a lie, TIMMMBOTT!!!

Hey! That's my server.

[azimir]

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

Re:THINK ABOUT THE PEOPLE

[Ilan Volow]

But this could be just what the underemployed Redneck, Snaggle Toothed Monster Truck programmers need in this slow economy.

Looks similar

[willpost]

Reminds me of the projects people bring to the Homebrew Robotics Club

http://www.hbrobotics.org/

Timbot detects Bugs

[Ilan Volow]

For some unknown reason Timbot gives strange warnings about rabbits.

Re:THINK ABOUT THE PEOPLE

[Tackhead]

> In the year 2000, all monster trucks will be controlled by Slashdot Techies using Remote Controls.

Survival Research Labs has been doing senseless violence with giant teleoperated robots since 1980.

Rather than drawing a comparison between SRL and Robot Wars (likely involving a Saturn V and a bottle rocket) suffice it to say that during an SRL show in Austria, the Army was called out out to investigate reports from town residents who thought there was an invasion in progress.

110HP remote controlled car...

[diesel_jackass]

http://travis.servebeer.com/volvo

(remote control not included)

Monster Warchaulking!

[Lazarus_Bitmap]

Mount a Pringle's can on top of it and imagine the possibilities!

Imagine a beow... oh never mind..

New Slashdot category

[Earlybird]

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

wow...

[mikeee]

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.