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Robosapien: Latest Toy Robot From Mark Tilden
Onnimikki writes "Mark Tilden has been building really cool BEAM robots for a long time. Now, he's come up with RoboSapien, a toy that no self-respecting geek can go without. Videos of the RoboSapien at the 2004 New York City Toy Fair have been made available by Solarbotics. Mark offers some really good explanations about what makes them work."
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
A small, somewhat cute robot that wouldn't freak you at at 4 AM if you bumped into it.
Actually, I found this pretty cool. Amazing these little guys have such ablities consdering the technology.
After seeing countless videos of many different robots, this is on the only one I could see putting on my desk. Don't know how the ghosts who haunt my abode are going to feel about it though.
that's a shame.. I hope that they made it optional at least! I want to make my robosapiens scare the crap out of my housemate when he gets home! :)
click-clack, front and back. I'm not moving this car otherwise.
I got this at least second hand so if somebody has a more accurate version I would be interested to hear it.
Mark was giving a presentation at a conference. He was showing off one of his small insect robots. He then (to the audience's horror) crumpled it up like a wad of paper and put it down on top of the overhead projector. The audience was then able to see it unfold itself and walk away.
Unfortunately, the story has a larger context which explains how it comes to be that Mark is down in the States rather than still here in Canada. Again, I would be interested in hearing an accurate version of the story.
Because the robots he builds aren't build using fast microcontrollers and heuristics to get things to move. They're designed using analog techniques (i.e. discrete amplifiers, capacitors, and resistors instead of a custom ASIC - similar to the way people designed things like TVs 30yrs ago with only a couple dozen transistors versus the millions of logic gates in modern TVs). So instead of using a digital timer on a chip you could use a charging capacitor. Well designed analog systems can be much better than digital solutions.
The main reason people don't do things in analog more often is that its hard to design and its typically even harder to design something that can be mass produced (due to tolerances/ manufacturing variations). A popular control systems design book has a photo of his UniBug on the cover because it's such a neat applications of controls theory. The bug can walk without needing any long fine tuning to get parameters to just the right value.
Of course analog design suffers from a whole host of problems that the digital world is relatively immune to. For example, noise in an analog system is a huge killer whereas noise in a digital system isn't so bad untill you start working at >100MHz. For example, 1-2mv (that's 10^-3) of noise in your analog system can be deadly if you're amplifying that signal by 100x-1000x whereas 1-2mv of noise in a digital part isn't such a big problem.
If these motor skills can really be done at such a price, there's no reason why we shouldnt see pretty dramatic drops in the prices of the more expensive tech toys.
Don't be so sure. These are analog control circuits, not digital logic. So there' s no CPU or microcontroller to program with autonomous-ish behavior. And theres not an easy (or cheap) way to control the analog circuits even with add-on digital controller of some sort or add new response behavior based on new sensor inputs -- the discrete component operating ranges are to small to produce the wide variety of behavior you can do with digital logic.
So, if you want this toy to do something new, you can't just tweak some assembly code, or vary the pulse-code modulation signal to a servo, you have to design a new control circuit. There's the rub.
Still kinda cool to watch an $80 robot do a little jig with decent dexterity. It's a great achievement in low-cost analog feedback control systems. If we just knew how to make cheap resistors and capacitors with wide ranges of easily-controllable parameters, we'd be seeing some major advancements spawning from this.. .
everything in moderation
Well need to wire the jaw back in place this is outstanding. Now tie it into a computer as a hire leval brain and wow!
That made the Sony one look like 2 year old mush!
Are they sure it will go for 99 dollars! WOW!
This is one of the only robots I'd buy. Looks fun and entertaining, but the real clincher for me is the price.
A robot has always been a geek toy I've wanted, and this one will definitely fit my price range.
If anyone else has simliar, relatively low-priced robots, fill me in?
Thanks.
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What Tilden emphasized with the RoboSimian, was the customization possibilities involved. Are you listening, action figure customizing freaks? Now you can dress up and paint your very own robot. He also said that because of its affordability, techno-geeks (I'm looking at you, Dave) can open this sucker up and play around with his insides, looking to see not only how he works, but what can be done to him. Wise move.
If Mark Tilden says he made it so you could play with the guts, I think I'm gonna want to play with the guts.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
(see also http://groups.yahoo.com/group/beam/message/41592 )
This is a radio controlled toy that is run by a microcontroller (the PIC20) using 12Kb of programming. Yep, good old software, the bane of the BEAMworld.
The motor driver chip no doubt is a variation on Tilden's "adaptive h-bridge design", but that is about all of the "nervous net technology" that is being used - heck, the motors in all the other "robots" are analog but no one goes around claiming how they are so special...
I am going to buy one simply because it is a lot of "stuff" for relatively little money. However, having been the BEAM Heretic for 7 years now, I take all the the exaggerated claims with the same tablespoon of salt I usually do.
Old quote: Digital is just really fast analog.
Zoz
hogfather@no spam earthlink.net
----- Get rid of
I didn't say it wasn't interesting. One the contrary, it is an amazing control system, to repeat myself.
The real world can be analog and digital at the same time. It's red not blue. it's a sort of pinkish red. Is time discreet or continuos? What do you mean you do not know!
Time is continuous on the scale of interest to robotics -- human scale. No question.
Fixed, what is fixed? There are a lot of fixed values in the human body. In fact most of the body is based on very fixed processes. Feed back, is a very fixed response. The complexity comes with the sheer number of feedback systems working in parrallel. We cannot model this complexity with a pre-programmed system, but it may be possible to simulate the feedback and then set those loose to model the system.
Sure, if you're implementing the very-hard-to stabilize multiple simultaneous parallel interacting feedback loops. But that's not what this is. This thing does multiple sequential control systems. It's an important distinction theoretically and practically.
Have you _EVER_ worked with a digital robot, adding a new senosr is not easy? Adding a new response is not easy. In fact this is one of the main stumbling blocks of digital robots. Everytime you add a new sensor you have to explicity program for it. That means the robot is limited by the imagination/time of the designer.
Yes, I made a few based on 68HC11 microcontrollers in my EE undergrad work. It's technically challenging to add a new sensor and program/debug code to make it work in a digital system like that, especially if you don't know what you're doing. But it's infinitely easier to master than making a closed feedback loop control system be able to accept a new input and still be stable, much less actually do it.
In response to your last paragraph, take a look at beam robots. See how they can do tasks with a few components that complex digital robots cannot. See how they deal with component failures. Think about how this ties back to nature. See that tieing into a feedback circuit is easy, but ultimately unpredictable.
They each do pre-set things. Maybe several different ones, selectable in sequence, but the systems themselves are designed to be stable around a known point -- that's why they work -- there will never be any emergent behavior, or even cleverly-programmed unexpected behavior. It will always do what it does, however cool that may look.
Read Stephen Wolfram, Steve Grand and Mark Tilden. All three are showing that unpredictable complexity can be modeled by designing simple feedback systems and then letting them interfere with each other. Chaos theory is the underlying mathamatics.
Right, I didn't say it's not an interestig field with lots of cool stuff to discover. Maybe you're confusing me with the originator of this thread.
To cast aside this arena as just a cheap toy is to be blind to the sheer scope of the undertaking.
It is cheap. It is a toy. But I'm not casting it aside. I'm apt to buy one, in fact. I only noted that this technology is unlikely to decrease the cost of digital microcontroller-based robots and Aibo-like toys, except possibly by sheer competition and market force (at first), because it's fundamentally different technology.
Orville, Wilbour put down that paper plane it's just a toy.
That's not nice.
everything in moderation