OmniTread: A serpentine robot

karvind writes "Physorg is running a story about OmniTread: a serpentine robot designed to traverse extremely difficult terrain, such as the rubble of a collapsed building. The 26-pound robot is developed at the University of Michigan U-M College of Engineering. It moves by rolling, log-style, or by lifting its head or tail, inchworm-like, and muscling itself forward. Link to videos. Check out there other robots as well."

Comments

Crikey!

[Dancin_Santa]

Someone call Steve Irwin!

Clarification of how this works

[MobyDisk]

From the article:

These treads prevent the snakebot from stalling or becoming stuck on rough terrain because, similar to a tire touching a road, t the treads propel the robot forward like a tire touching a road.

Well, that sure made it clear!

Re:Clarification of how this works

[rob_squared]

Trust me, after seeing the way some people drive, it'd be nice to see this kind of detail in the driver's manual.

Re:Clarification of how this works

[flyingsquid]

Tires touching the road... shit, I knew I was doing something wrong.

cool

[dteichman2]

I imagine that with more development, this could lead to subways/trains without tracks. Or, perhaps "smart" cars that "know" how to handle obstacles and avoid collisions.

Re:cool

[Jeremi]

Or, perhaps "smart" cars that "know" how to handle obstacles and avoid collisions.

Great, just what I need... SUVs crawling over my house at night.

Re:cool

[Digital Pizza]

Perhaps I'm a little slow, but why did the parent get modded as a troll? Just curious.

Re:cool

[isopossu]

The passenger cars are deliberately made somehow hard to drive. While the automatic system cannot handle every possible situation, the driver has to be kept alert.

Re:cool

[ArsenneLupin]

Or, perhaps "smart" cars that "know" how to handle obstacles and avoid collisions.

Great! So now we'll get SUV who'll gladly climb over any VW bugs unfortunate enough to be in its path. The SUV will handle the situation just fine, but the VW bug will be slightly flatter than before!

Re:cool

[B3ryllium]

That's not true. According to the commercials, the dome design will improve structural integrity and prevent worm-robot-SUV-flattenings. ;-)

Serpentine Sheldon!

[rob_squared]

Vince Ricardo: Serpentine Shelly. Serpentine!

From "The In-Laws," possibly the best Peter Falk movie ever, right next to "The Great Race."

Spheres with tentacles are better

[GAATTC]

From a comment posted below the article: "Arthur C. Clarke had it right --- spheres with tentacles; _that_ is the ultimate in agility and mobility, for robotic design. Plus, such units can easily link together to form a much greater whole, if required --- they could perform nearly *any* engineering, construction, or transportation task."

Re:Spheres with tentacles are better

[teh merry reaper]

The design challenges seem insurmountable, though, when you consider that this cutting edge robot is the equivalent of one tentacle. However, robots with tentacles would potentially be quite popular in hentai.

Re:Spheres with tentacles are better

[schwatoo]

"Any sufficiently tentacled sphere is indistinguishable from the Great Cthulhu".

Re:Spheres with tentacles are better

[joetheappleguy]

Don't forget that tentacles are required for most Hentai out there.

Re:Spheres with tentacles are better

[Have Blue]

Thanks. Now I'll never look at Koosh balls the same way again.

Re:Spheres with tentacles are better

[xactuary]

Are you saying we now have proof that Arthur C. Clark is really Dr. Benton Quest?

Re:Spheres with tentacles are better

[ikkonoishi]

While spheres have the lowest surface area to volume ratio, cubes are far easier to store and link.

Re:Spheres with tentacles are better

[bruthasj]

Or a sufficiently overgrown Chia Pet.

Re:Spheres with tentacles are better

[Omega Leader-(P12)]

Yes, but cubes don't roll. Think or the security "balls" from The Prisoner, or if you are too young. Think of The Simpsons spoof.

Re:Spheres with tentacles are better

[chialea]

Rhombic dodecahedrons are another good option. They're closer to spheres, but still stack densely, like cubes.

Lea

Re:Spheres with tentacles are better

[B3ryllium]

Star Wars Episode 1 had security balls. Instead of tentacles, though, they had portions of the sphere extend in triangular patterns to create a mounting point for stability.

George Lucas really embellished his balls in that one.

Re:Spheres with tentacles are better

[rapett0]

Could this issue not be easily solved by simply placing the tentacles into a position to make the parameter of the unit square when turned off, for storage? BTW, I claim copyright/patent, etc :)

I know this is off-topic but...

[kernel_dan]

Am I really that unobservant or is the hardware section new?

Re:I know this is off-topic but...

[Lehk228]

it's Been around a while (january 2,1998 appears to be the first posting to that section)

Re:I know this is off-topic but...

[EtherAlchemist]

At first I thought you were kidding. Something along the lines of...

Slashdot's Hardware Section

I read both (and others) daily and seems like at least one thing from Gizmodo shows up on the front page here per day. Nothing wrong with that, but when I'm bored and trying to find new "news" and other interesting things, it's just a drag to see the same thing proliferated across sites.

Re:I know this is off-topic but...

[Webtommy88]

Even though it's already been stated the section is not new, I have to tell you I share my sentiments. I was confused as to why the green bars started to have these circuits on them until I noticed it wasn't the normal section.

So you're not the only one.

Re:I know this is off-topic but...

[kernel_dan]

Aha! So I'm not crazy. It just appeared today for the first time. Google's cache from yesterday (3/22) does not include the link to hardware.slashdot.org in the left sidebar.

Re:A 40MB file on slashdot.

[rob_squared]

Doesn't mirrordot automatically mirror things from slashdot? Wouldn't that make some kind of infinite loop? Mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors of mirrors... [no carrier]

Re:A 40MB file on slashdot.

[dcclark]

I think this was the same UMich server that got taken out by a /. story around exam time last December. It's probably close to midterm/exam time there now. I smell a conspiracy... "but the server was slashdotted! How could I look up the course materials?"

I wonder

[Yeshua]

How modular the design is.

It is obviously made of 5 (reasonably) identical parts, but I wonder if you can (in theory) make a robot of this type as longs as you want just by `tacking' on a new section (of course this ignores drive train problems).

Re:I wonder

[loupgarou21]

it shouldn't be too hard to figure out a way to make the drive train adaptable to additional sections, look at some laser printers (ie. IBM InfoPrint 1120) you can add an additional tray to the device by just sticking it at the bottom of the stack, you don't even have to worry about plugging anything in. You would just have to be mildly creative about it.

Re:I wonder

[AeroIllini]

It is obviously made of 5 (reasonably) identical parts, but I wonder if you can (in theory) make a robot of this type as longs as you want just by `tacking' on a new section (of course this ignores drive train problems).

It actually wouldn't be too hard to give each section its own motor and power supply. The connection between each section would include an umbilical capable of transmitting data, and perhaps even extra voltage if one of the power units (batteries) was not providing sufficient power. At that point, operation of the robot becomes a software issue; how do you program each pod with identical software that can all work together as a cohesive whole, in real time? If all of the individual components are identical but work flawlessly together, at almost any length, then theoretically the robot could add more sections or shed damaged ones without compromising functionality. Specialized sections could also be attached to the front and/or rear, for digging, drilling, collecting, clearing, bomb dismantling, carrying, or anything else you can think of.

I noticed in the video that the crew was using a remote to control the robot. (I also noticed the distinct lack of any purposeful log-rolling, contrary to what the editor said--but I digress.) Ideally, of course, such remote operation would not be needed. Crews using the robots--rescue teams, bomb squads, recovery missions--should be able to just tell the robot, "hey, go explore over there. We'll be watching on the monitors, and you tell us if you find anything." The locomotion of the robot would then be completely automated, based on a set of instructions (one of a library of scripts, maybe; use the "find and bring out bomb" script, or the "search for human survivors" script), with the operator just gathering data, and perhaps taking manual control if needed.

Re:I wonder

[Nebu]

How modular the design is. It is obviously made of 5 (reasonably) identical parts, but I wonder if you can (in theory) make a robot of this type as longs as you want just by `tacking' on a new section

If you go into the slideshow on the site, there's an image of the robot composed of 7 sections instead of 5.

Re:I wonder

[ytpete]

I interned at Xerox PARC two summers ago and saw a snake-like robot very similar to this. The motion is different---undulating like a caterpillar instead of using treads. But otherwise strikingly similar.

theoretically the robot could add more sections or shed damaged ones without compromising functionality
This is how PARC's modular robots worked, which is the really cool part. The modules could be snapped apart and then reassembled into a different-shaped robot. Some models could even reconfigure themselves without intervention.

The connection between each section would include an umbilical capable of transmitting data, and perhaps even extra voltage ...
Some of the PARC modules did exactly that. And they had limited demos with specialized attachments instead of generic modules, also as you mentioned.

My housemate that summer was working on the control system of these robots. The computer fed them simple script-like commands, so there was no real AI backing it up. Given that, it was impressive what these things managed to do. But of course, they were working toward taking input from each module and applying complex processing to react to it.

As far as your suggestion about distributed processing across modules, other groups at PARC were doing work in that field too. Awesome place to intern!

Re:I wonder

[chialea]

Hmm... two summers ago. I worked in the modular robotics lab for a few years a bit before that.

On-board power is definitely not easy, both because it takes a lot of power to move that much robot around and because batteries make the robot heavier (and larger), which makes the problem even worse.

I'm assuming your housemate was working on the plastic polybot modules, which were run off of an offboard processing board, or one of the cubic or rhombic models. The G2 hardware had a CAN bus and onboard processing quite a bit before that.

About distributed processing, Mark, a visiting professor, and I developed an algorithm for distributed computation of inverse kinematics for high-dof robots like polybot, specifically for splitting across modules.

I will certainly agree that PARC is a great place to work :)

Lea

Re:I wonder

[orim]

Yeah, totally!

They showed a prototype of this in that documentary "The Core." They were able to travel to the center of the Earth and restart the core's spin, thus saving Earth!

Eat your heart out, Jules Verne!

Re:I wonder

[ytpete]

I'm assuming your housemate was working on the plastic polybot modules, which were run off of an offboard processing board
Yeah, he was working on the G1 modules, which were controlled by a cable leading to a PC. The PC processed a simple script language and sent commands to the modules. I didn't RTFA, but it sounds like the UMich robots are a step behind here, using human "pilots."

About distributed processing, Mark, a visiting professor, and I developed an algorithm for distributed computation of inverse kinematics for high-dof robots like polybot, specifically for splitting across modules.
Cool, I remember the videos for that stuff. I was referring to a separate team that did work on distributed (car) traffic monitoring (and some cool ideas for military use). It unfortunately didn't look like they were working with the robot lab at all.

I will certainly agree that PARC is a great place to work :)
Ain't it? They had a great atmsophere there -- even in shaky financial times -- and an incredible variety of projects. It's a shame they've been cursed with such little commercial success.

Ooh, snake! A snake!

[FlyByPC]

Badgerbadgerbadger... (C'mon -- *someone* had to say it...)

Re:Ooh, snake! A snake!

[dartboard]

I think you meant:

WolverwineWolverineWolverine....

It's so simple.

[Anonymous Coward]

Their other robots are there. They're amazing.

At least we haven't slashdotted the server yet...

[carpe_noctem]

...but I'm sure we will soon. Everyone should check out this rad 7min video of this thing in action. Very cool. =)

Memory Shape Alloys

[TimeTraveler1884]

I have always wondered why robotics engineering has not taken more approaches using memory-shape alloys. Mondo-tronics has a product called Muscle Wire that has carbon or graphite embedded in the alloy so that it heats up when an electric current is applied. This causes the Nitinol to contract as the alloy returns to its "memory" shape.

Really the only thing I have seen using this form of memory-shape alloys is just for hobbyist projects, nothing serious. Granted there are some problems to overcome, such as duty cycles and heat dissipation. But most of these could be solved, I have looked into them. On larger scale projects the cost could be prohibitive though.

The value as I see memory-shape alloys over motors, is that it is almost a solid-state actuator. There really is no moving parts that can wear, other than the alloy itself. And these memory-shape alloys have a very high force/weight ratio - thus making the bulk of most robotics not a function of locomotion.

Re:Memory Shape Alloys

[loupgarou21]

one problem is that Nitinol really doesn't contract that much, usually only 5-7% (if I'm remembering correctly) however one especially clever nitinol crawler was able to move something like 20% of it's total body length per step

Re:Memory Shape Alloys

[SnowZero]

They are slower, and although lighter, are less power efficient than ordinary motors. So unless weight is the only concern (and battery weight is't a problem), they aren't useful for much on reasonably sized robots. And as soon as your robot gets reasonably sized and isn't on a cord, battery size and weight is *the* problem. Also IIRC nitinol yield stress isn't that great (i.e. expensive *and* breaks when your actuator gets yanked on).

People are still working on artificial muscles though, and hopefully they'll get something that scales well eventually. It'll take a lot of work to catch up with a billion years of evolution however (or intelligent design by $DIETY, whatever).

Re:Memory Shape Alloys

[ink_13]

Perhaps because they're not yet strong enough to beat even a teenaged girl at arm wrestling?

Re:Memory Shape Alloys

[GeneJock]

They have been considered. One of the big problems is that they tend to require large power sources, which with battery operated robots makes your duration nil.

ed2k link of the movie

[Anonymous Coward]

remember to remove the spaces

ed2k://|file|OmniTread.SwRI-7min.320x240 x30.wmv|39219440|00C932FF9AD4D798E92C05D9869EE323| /

serpentine movement suggestion

[thomasa]

Only the treads that are touching the ground should
move. The others moving in air are wasted motion. That does not seem efficient.

Re:serpentine movement suggestion

[ldm314]

It is efficient in several ways:

- Eliminates complicated gearing

- Every part that can come in contact with a surface has full torque

And when you are tethered to a cable anyways, and not run on battery power, you probably don't have to worry as much about efficiency.

Re:serpentine movement suggestion

[ArsenneLupin]

Actually, if you read their promo litterature, you'd see that the next prototype wil have threads that can be disengaged when not in use.

Re:serpentine movement suggestion

[thomasa]

Next time try thinking before posting.

Perhaps you could do the same.

Re:A 40MB file on slashdot.

[ag0ny]

I'm still downloading it at 95KB/s...

Mouse vs Snake?

[Mulletproof]

"Physorg is running a story about OmniTread: a serpentine robot designed to traverse extremely difficult terrain, such as the rubble of a collapsed building."

I thought Remote control mice were taking that job.

Re:Mouse vs Snake?

[odsock]

heh,all the ad links on the left there are for pest control. :)

Obligatory bash.org quote

[dracken]

what does your robot do, sam
it collects data about the surrounding environment, then discards it and drives into walls

-Dracken

Hurray, I'm saved

[skomes]

They need to send this baby over the to the disaster area that is my room. First mission: Pick up my underwear and clothes that need washing. It'll probably break down under that kind of stress though.

Virtually unstoppable?

[Lomithrandel]

Oh please, there is no robot design possible with a simple singular traction system that is virtually unstoppable. There are many many area where such a robot with a snake-like tread structure will simple be unable to get anywhere at all. I would be impressed if there was a use for anything but reconnaisance from a robot that can deal with as many situations as this one supposedly can however.

Slick. Wonder if..

[bunhed]

you can program it in python?

Re:Slick. Wonder if..

[Mr. Hankey]

A similar device was developed at NASA Ames. At least for a time part of its routines for getting around objects was written in perl, so I suppose Python wouldn't be out of the question. :)

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2 00 0/00images/snakebot/snakebot.html

Missing Part!

[knapper_tech]

Somebody fill out a requisition for the Batterylife Activator!

More like a caterpillar

[SnowZero]

This is more like a caterpillar than a snake. It uses tracks all over its body (like many small feet), rather than a serpentine motion to propel itself. Props though, as this seems far more practical than robots that actually try to move like snakes or inchworms.

I've sat through many talks about modular robots that are supposed to be able to do everything, yet rarely do anything well at all (I come from a lab doing what I guess you'd call "specialized monolithic" robots). I think this robot is just specialized enough to be useful (using its treads). The walking snake like robots are normally agonizingly slow, but this robot moves at a reasonable speed for the type of applications you'd need it for. Also, tracks should scale up in speed reasonably well if needed.

Re:More like a caterpillar

[Bonhamme Richard]

The thing about robotic snakes is that they can get anywhere a real snake can. My professor's snake-bots can climb straight up a drainpipe, tube, or crack. The caterpillar one only managed a 22 degree angle. Doesn't make "real" snakebots more useful in general, but speed isn't everything, and CMU's snake-bots can really get around...

Re:More like a caterpillar

[SnowZero]

In that case progress is being made and that's good to hear. Perhaps I came off a bit too negative in the GP. Pure modular/reconfigurable robots strike me as fantastically difficult, especially when you start talking about onboard power; Snake robots do have a future as you point out, but they still need some work to be useful for things like urban search and rescue. But then again, what robot doesn't need more work :) At any rate my main point is that we should distinguish caterpillars-like vs snake-like, and ultimately I think they'll be used for different things.

Though another take on it is that you could create any hybrid between pure snake and pure tracked, or even add wheels or rollers at some segments. The future will be interesting.

Re:A 40MB file on slashdot.

[norkakn]

no, no

that was eecs.umich.edu. eecs is probably some dual pII in a closet somewhere. It serves up static pages, mostly for internal usage.

engin.umich.edu is a bunch of heavy iron suns. Probably right now there are more than a few instances of matlab and some simv procs running

My first thought...

[Infinityis]

When I saw this, the first thing I thought was how nice a large version of this could be. It seems like it would be suitable for something like the DARPA Grand Challenge. http://www.darpagrandchallenge.com/

What about controls?

[Statecraftsman]

That thing looks like you need more than a joystick. It'd be really great if they showed how many buttons they have on their control board. By my count the 5 segment version has 9 degrees of freedom. 1 for the front back and the other 8 for the 2 degrees of freedom for each joint.

Also, does it know which way is up and readjust or do you have to figure that out after it rolls?

Re:What about controls?

[Sparr0]

Why? The movement of this is controlled with a simple two-D joystick.

Re:Purposes?

[SnowZero]

That's exactly the kind of thing they want to use this type of robot for. They focus on rubble and similar terrain, because if it isn't hard to traverse, you might as well use wheels. Exploring mines and caves could be useful too, but urban search and rescue is a big topic now. After a disaster, you want to rescue people as fast as possible to save them, but the earlier after a collapse, the more dangerous it is for the rescuers who risk getting trapped themselves. Robots can be sent in immediately becuase you don't care much if you lose them.

Syd Mead

[Unordained]

http://www.scrubbles.net/mead/mead12.html
I came across this a few days ago, seemed vaguely related conceptually.

Snakebots are very fragile!

[Quantum Jim]

My friend Jer Romeiko builds these kinds of robots for a living. You can download some cool videos of snakebot action at his employer's web site (CMU).

Snakebots are very fragile. Many times a section would break after a few hours demostration. Jer was working on making each section more modular and easier to build. Apparently the main goal of snakebots for many research labs are for providing demostrations (read: grantbots) and giving new grad students something to do. ;-)

Re:Snakebots are very fragile!

[ArsenneLupin]

Those at CMU appear to be so much faster

Read the fine-print: the videos are played at twice the speed...

Re:Snakebots are very fragile!

[chialea]

I've put together more of those segments than I can count (note that this is Mark Yim's design, from PARC, borrowed by CMU). They're using a /very/ old hardware design, using weak motors and weak parts. (The motors + the weight of the segments certainly have enough leverage to break the frames, but that's another issue.) The modular robotics group at PARC had much, much better hardware years ago, and were working on G3 when I left.

A short overview of polybot hardware:
http://www2.parc.com/spl/projects/modro bots/chain/ polybot/index.html

Lea

This is reminiscent of...

[Anonymous Coward]

A one-time BattleBot that was run in Vegas by one of the guys at ILM. It was designed like a snake and was very capable of moving around just like one (with a nice little "rattler" to boot). While it could move around, the problem with the design is that there is little you can do with it. I'm curious as to how utilities and other devices could be attached to make this useful. I suppose small cameras and lights could be implemented, making it somewhat useful for rescue missions.

Polybot

[Digital Pizza]

Check out Xerox PARC's PolyBot; each segment contains its own motor and PowerPC processor. This was on Slashdot some time ago.

Re:Polybot

[ytpete]

See also my recent post higher up on this thread. I got to see these things in action as an intern at PARC and they're pretty cool. They don't require manual remote control like the UMichigan versions seem to. And they can be reconfigured (sometimes autonomously) into other shapes as well.

And from the looks of the CMU site linked to above, their project is heavily based on this PARC work.

"Rolling like a log"

[ArsenneLupin]

In the whole video, this only happened twice... and each time it looked accidental. The primary means of propulsion are the tracks (movement along its length), and bellows (which allow it to lift its "head" to climb over obstacles).

Don't try this at home

[PetoskeyGuy]

Almost everything they learned making the robot has been patented. So do the students who worked to create this robot end up paying the college to patent the research they performed? Do College's have patent contracts boilerplate on student applications now?

Re:Don't try this at home

[EmagGeek]

Yes, they do. Even when I applied to college in 1991, there was a waiver of rights to intellectual property built into the application. Anything I created belonged to the school, regardless of whether it was for class or on my own time. They even handed out intellectual property disclosure forms in the event we had an idea.. This IP agreement was written so poorly that it even claimed IP ownership to things I created while employed off-campus.

It is just urban legend, but I have heard that some schools make you sign over creations for some fixed period of time AFTER you graduate. I haven't seen it for myself, though.

Weight distribution among segments?

[ArsenneLupin]

Anybody know how to explain the photo a the 4th page of the presentation? (robot having its head and middle segment resting on top "stair", while tail is hanging "in the air").

Such position looks as if it would only be possible if "head" is substantially heavyer than "tail" (or else it would tip backwards). However, the doc states that the middle segment is the heavyest. Or does it also have the means of pumping liquid for one end segment to the other to achieve more optimal weight distribution? In any case, if such feature exist, it isn't mentioned anywhere...

Re:Weight distribution among segments?

[fbartho]

If you look closely and count the segments you should see that the middle segment is on the edge, since that is hooked and assuming the rest of the snake is equally weighted, on its own you should be able to balance it at that point... I don't really see why thay would only work if the head were heavier than the tail...

Re:Weight distribution among segments?

[ysachlandil]

The center of weight is in the middle, the middle of the robot is extended a couple of inches beyond the 'stair'. So the robot should be unbalanced, right?

But since the two 'head' segments are nearly horizontal, and the two 'tail' segments are diagonal, the 'head' segments extend their mass further away from the tilt point, and thus shift the center of gravity to the 'head' of the robot.

HTH
--Blerik

Re:Weight distribution among segments?

[ArsenneLupin]

[head] extend their mass further away from the tilt point [than tail]

Oops, didn't think about this. Yes, obviously this explains it.

Re:At least we haven't slashdotted the server yet.

[Kiryat Malachi]

Hah.

No, you probably won't. COE at Michigan has what is technically termed "phat pipe", and the main web servers are more than capable of handling your piddly little Slashdot attack.

YOU ARE HITTING THE MAIN WEBSERVERS FOR A 40,000 STUDENT UNIVERSITY WITH 10,000 ENGINEERING STUDENTS. Slashdotting? Unlikely. It'd be like slashdotting Sun.

Cool, but...

[AliasMoze]

it's hard not to be a little disappointed with the state of robot technology. We've landed a man on the moon, split the atom, and decoded our genes, yet we're supposed to be impressed by a (human-controlled) robot that can crawl like a caterpillar.

Don't get me wrong. I realize this is a step forward, but the current state of robots seems so behind others.

Re:Cool, but...

[way2trivial]

yea, and I'm going to tycho city on my next vacation..

Landed on the moon, 26 freaking years ago..

US can't even get a man into high orbit right now...

What's behind>?

It's pretty simple actually

[commodoresloat]

It works like a tire touching a road.

Re:A 40MB file on slashdot.

[fbartho]

Guys... Slashdot wouldn't taken down umich... please let me know when this supposedly happened... I'm an engineer on campus and I've seen some of the servers... I use them every day for all my homework... engin.umich.edu and the various subservers are continuously connected to my desktop with ssh for the AFS serverspace as well as for compiling/running/writing my code for my Programming classes. Around exam time someone fucked up with the news-servers... they were switching them around and brought themselves down, Another time, part of eecs went down... (some of the hosts) some runaway processes started by too many instances of a grading script trying to catch too many e-mails of a class of 150 students of whom apparently more than half had submitted the debug folder of their Visual Studio Projects in directx to the script along with their source files making a bunch of 10 meg zips that were being extracted, built, and run (or attempted to run) until they were killed by timeout.

Finally a piece of lsa umich.edu went down lately because PeopleSoft supplied us with crappy server intensive webapplications for our class selection interface, and due to all the students attempting to simultaneously register for classes near exam times it went down...

Both engin and umich though are extremely stable.
200 liscences of UGNX2 are hosted on the servers.
Uncounted licenses of matlab maple maya and a bunch of other programs are also hosted on these terminals

Beyond the normal software available to terminal users below I have attached a list of the extra packages I can add to use... all of these are server side, with X11 forwarding on many.

Fun random fact is that all the CAEN (Engineering Computers) reboot overnight if they're not in use, into linux, and run a distributed computing program.

Sorry about the formatting for the lameness filter

1. ABAQUS 2. ADAMS 3. AMPL 4. ANSOFT 5. ANSYS 6. APPLIX 7. ARC/INFO 8. ARC/VIEW 9. AUTO 10. AVS 11. Allegro Common Lisp 12. Aspen Plus 13. CERIUSHP,SGI 14. COVENTORWARE 15. CPLEX 16. CVS 17. Cadence IC 18. Cadence LDV 19. Calibre *20. DDD *21. EXPLORER HP,,SGI,Linux 22. Emacs All 23. Exmh All 24. FEMLABHP, 25. FLUENTHP, 26. Formality 27. FrameMaker *28. GAIM All*29. GNU Compilers/Utils All 30. GambitAll 31. Gnuplot 32. HP ADS 33. HP-UX 10.20/11.00 Compiler Opti HP 34. HSPICE 35. Hercules *36. Hypermesh *37. I-DEAS 38. ICCAP 39. IDL 40. IMSL 41. Insure++ 42. Island Software ,AIX 43. Jack HP,SGI 44. Java ,HP 45. Khoros,SGI,AIX 46. LCLint 47. Labview 48. Lynx 49. Lyx 50. MCNP ,Solaris,HP 51. MPI 52. Mach TA *53. Maple ,SGI,AIX,X86 54. Math All 55. MathematicaAll*56. Matlab 57. MatrixX ,Solaris,HP*58. Maya Linux 59. Mentor AMS 60. Mentor DFT 61. Mentor ICFlow 62. Modelsim ,Windows 63. NAG HP,, Linux 64. NASTRAN 65. NCAR Graphics 66. Nanosim *67. Netscape/Mozilla 68. Opnet 69. Oracle,IBM 70. PV-WAVE 71. Pathmill 72. PatranHP 73. Pico , HP 74. Pine All 75. Primepower 76. Pro/Engineer 77. Purify 78. RDesktop 79. Raphael 80. RealAudio/RealVideo 81. SYNOPSYS 82. Saber 83. Silicon Ensemble 84. Splint 85. Star-RCXT *86. StarOffice , Linux 87. Surfacer 88. TDI IBM 89. TDS 90. TeX 91. TecPlot 92. TetraMax *93. Unigraphics 94. VCS 95. Wordperfect*96. XEmacsHP, 97. XFig ,DEC*98. XMMS

Re:At least we haven't slashdotted the server yet.

[fbartho]

Hehe, I am sleeping on the "phat pipe" its fun. :) very warm. about body temperature.

Re:What good is this "Robot"?

[ArsenneLupin]

AND it is connected to a driver by a bunch of wires.

The "bunch of wires" is probably because it's still a prototype. The finished product will be radiocontrolled, obviously (or at least I hope so).

Indeed, if you watch carefully, the "bunch of wires" would make the robot useless in real conditions: the wires would get tangled into the debris, and hold the contraption back, even though the robot by itself could cope. Many times in the video, you'll see the handlers rearranging that cable to make sure it doesn't get tangled anywhere.

News?

[Anonymous Coward]

I couldn't access the article now, so I can only base this on the comments and the post, but... is this realy new?
I mean: http://www.snakerobots.com/main.htm

or am missing out on something from TFA? =)

In a further development

[flyingsquid]

The robotic snake offered a woman working on the project a robotic apple...

Re:A 40MB file on slashdot.

[geggibus]

700Kb/s here.. impressing..

Re:A 40MB file on slashdot.

[norkakn]

Um, why you responded to me instead of the parent is sort of confusing. when the London Law game got posted on slashdot, it destroyed EECS.umich.edu. I was in the 4th floor eecs opteron lab at the tme, and we were all rather pissed. (I was in 470 and needed some of the specs on the server) I don't have an eecs account, so all I actually know about it is that it is running solaris 8.

I've been going through the archives, and I found a dupe of the story, but not the actual one (unless comments got ripped from it)

Important question

[arhar]

Does it grow longer the more dots it eats?

Re:A 40MB file on slashdot.

[Webtommy88]

PeopleSoft supplied us with crappy server intensive webapplications for our class selection interface

By god, my school isin't the only one then, I could not for the life of me figure out why my school bought such shitty software from them. Apparently my school wasn't the only one scammed by their PR.

Peoplesoft = worse web apps I have ever had the displeasure to use.

Re:Purposes?

[Voxus]

"I am sorry I cannot help you. However, perhaps if I sing a song, you will feel better?"

wow!

[sootman]

Over 100 comments so far and I, for one, am the first to welcome our new serpentine robot overlords?

Re:A 40MB file on slashdot.

[fbartho]

The sad thing is that we kindof knew that... but they had an agreement where they got to update our software at will... we had already had a working version of software but they decided the needed to update ours. With a completely new I'm only assuming barely tested version, because it completely fried for awhile, and even released private data on 2 or 3 occasions. Privacy breech due to bad code... and the funny thing is that I heard that the company just recently got sent on a move to dissolve (Adobe, or Oracle, or Novell bought them (can't remember which) and decided to cut jobs in them. ALOT, a month or two back)

Snake 3D

[amanox]

Wow baby, real 3D snake gaming !! Now if only they could make these humanoid robots a bit faster and cheap, and we can all play Doom 3D!

serpentine?

[grikdog]

Not sure I'd call that action serpentine. Real serpents use the classic tetrapod evolution, or else a kind of peristaltic slip and glide inside skin. The robot version looks like something that would have died suddenly during the Cambrian.

Did the robot write the press release, too?

[fnurb]

These treads prevent the snakebot from stalling or becoming stuck on rough terrain because, similar to a tire touching a road, t the treads propel the robot forward like a tire touching a road. Historically, scientists haven't had much success with wheeled and tracked robots on rough terrain because they constantly stall.