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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?
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
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
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.
Does that make it a normal sized truck?
Let's see....robot + truck...
= REAL LIFE TRANSFORMERS!
Cool. My very own Optimus Prime. How much?
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
It was called the Big Trak, and I think that's what was used to host the (currently /.ed) website.
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
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.
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
Also in the year 2000 people will find out that the Supreme Court is really just regular court with sour cream and tomatos.
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!
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...
-- http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/
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!
your haiku is not
must follow format you see
first five, seven, five.
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
But this could be just what the underemployed Redneck, Snaggle Toothed Monster Truck programmers need in this slow economy.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
For some unknown reason Timbot gives strange warnings about rabbits.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Could we invent a new Slashdot category, please? Call it Toys for Boys.