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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.

17 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. TIMMAY!!! by dildatron · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?
    1. Re:TIMMAY!!! by dildatron · · Score: 5, Informative

      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?
    2. Re:TIMMAY!!! by dildatron · · Score: 4, Informative

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

      --


      If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
  2. Oh the possibilites... by ElQuesoEsViejo · · Score: 4, Funny

    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

  3. BigTrax by DCram · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  4. 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...

    --

    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?

      --

      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
  5. Massive Truck, but Smaller Scale? by SniffleBear · · Score: 4, Funny

    Does that make it a normal sized truck?

  6. Hmmm...Nostalgia by da3dAlus · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    Cool. My very own Optimus Prime. How much?

    --

    Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
  7. Re:Reminds me of my childhood by teamhasnoi · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  8. 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)).

  9. Mirror of full story by mustangdavis · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    HallmarkOrnaments.Com
  10. This raises an entirely new issue... by jcrb · · Score: 5, Funny


    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
  11. Re:THINK ABOUT THE PEOPLE by e2d2 · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  12. Heh, it's finally a monster truck by Omega+Hacker · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!
  13. Hey! That's my server. by azimir · · Score: 5, Funny

    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