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Mars Rovers At Smithsonian And Exploratorium Now
Illah Nourbakhsh writes "From the makers of the Palm Pilot Robot Kit comes our newest thing. If you live in SF or in DC you can go to the biggest science centers of them all, the Air & Space Museum or the Exploratorium and interact with miniature Mars rovers we've put in Mars yards there. The robots take panoramic images and track and test rocks, so it's no remote-control toy. All Linux on-board, using a prototype single-board arm-based robotics board (the Intel Stayton). The website 'gallery' has pictures of all of the rover's parts, including the Linux processor and the mechanicals. Gallery also has several videos. We've built 20 of these 'bots and they're in DC, San Francisco and Augusta, Georgia." If these were in toy stores ...
Check it out, those photos on the first page of the link are notthumbnails! Yes folks, they are the full 330K jpegs, merely resized to the thumbnail size. Don't you hate that? I thought that habit died in 1999.
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The Tech museum in San Jose had an exhibit like this (about 3 years ago?). They had a little rover model running around in a simulated Martian crater. Visitors could control the rover remotely through a closed circuit TV and joystick setup. It was quite fun.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
What is a "Linux Processor"?
They have a PIC 16F877 controller driving 8 digital tristate I/O lines, and 8 analog lines (which I think were just input, IIRC). So we plugged the modified servos in as motors, and for sensors had switches, photoresistors, and an infrared rangefinder. The students were able to code in a somewhat-limited subset of C (due to the freeware compiler we had -- there was a better one available, but the instructor couldn't get funding for it) and compile it down, then transfer to the board (via a built-in serial port). It worked well for those applications, though with only a couple K of memory. In fact, I ended up writing a prettied-up API for the students, because the instructor decided he wasn't all that pleased with some of the low-level, non-intuitive calls (which would be trouble for those students who'd never coded before, let alone in C).
More info here on robotics at Leap: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~roboleap/
The Cerebellum was conveniently easy for this level, but I'm surprised they're using it for these rovers. I didn't think you could get Linux that small!
I think this is a new, autonomous exhibit, not the remote control ones from other museums.
The Houston Space Center has the remote control one, which me and the wife visited when we were on a pilgramage to Ikea (damn your fashionable and reasonably priced Nordic furniture! Why won't you build a store more than 50 miles from a port!).
I played with the joystick part, which allowed two rovers to compete to roll a ball into a goal. It was a somewhat low-res screen, and I thought it was a computer game ("why did they bother with 3D models if they were only going to show a nearly top-down view?"). It was only later that I saw the real models, and realized that I was remote controlling the robots. It was a very strange feeling, like realizing that something you read about in a Sci-Fi book has suddenly come to life.
If you go to the Houston Space Center, try to find one of the many discounts to get in. My Southwest Airlines frequent flyer card got me in cheaply, even though I drove to Houston.