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Open Robotics Debuts at Penguicon 3.0
thgreatoz writes "While attending Penguicon 3.0 in Novi, MI, I came across an interesting project. Matt Switlik of Swittech aims to do for robotics what the GPL did for Open Source Software - a completely open robotics platform. Dubbed the Open Robotics Peripheral Platform, or O.R.P.P, Switlik and his partner Jason Hunt have taken a completely modular approach to robotics, with the goal of making robot development as easy as homegrowing a PC. Will we see fleets of ORPP robots plowing our streets and mowing our lawns in the future?"
Someone please make sure they read Asimov first!!
http://nerdfortress.com/
That sounds good; however, if there's going to be an open robotics platform, does that apply to the actual software powering them? They don't necessarily have to have the exact same software in O.R.P.P. compliant robots, but just the same "kernel", so that extra code could just be modular: added in when needed.
Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
I noticed the first few posts were full of sarcasm at this topic. I would think something like this, that could bring cheap, efficient robotics to the massess would be lauded more on Slashdot.
That aside, I think this is something that has much promise. I am a beginning science teacher, and projects like this can be just the thing for young minds (even in old bodies.)
[http://it-tastes-so-good.blogspot.com] Are you hungry?
Taking the fun out of sitting-down-at-the-workshop-bench-for-hours-upon- end -so-that-you-can-prove-your-intelectual-advantage. ......one step at a time :)
Will the USA become a place where the only jobs needed will be thought based. No more jobs where a person is needed to do a repetitious task over and over? Will the next outsorcing be not out of the USA, but from human labour to robots?
I see so many problems here. What will people do for a living??
I don't want this to sound like trolling, but it will. There are enough people out there who are not made for work which requires too much thought. Not everyone can pass Chemistry 101. Some people require the factory jobs to make enough money to buy a house, and live a life. If we start lowering the value of those jobs, we will be shoving a whole class of people into poverty.
I also can't help but think of the horror of the next war we face. No more "human life lost", instead we'll send drone airplanes and robots to do the fighting. Mr and Mrs Redstate will no longer have to reconsider if a war is just when their child is killed ("Was it worth it?"). I wonder if we would have burned all of Vietnam down if we did not have to send any Americans, if we only had to send robots. We could declare the area too unsafe and keep the reporters out.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
I can't imagine the submitter did not intentionally choose examples of robots roaming about with blades and lots of power. The safety issues are tremendous. I don't mind when some new OS program dives on my laptop, but I'd rather not have a couple tons of snow-plow do so in my neighborhood.
Then again-- the platform may be open, but not everybody can afford that kind of hardware. Snowplows anyway-- lawn mowers are a whole different matter. How many geeks will be trying to get just a little more mileage out of that old 286 and end up killing the neighbor's cat?
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
...for the next major version. I don't mind skid-steer, but a heavy duty, chain driven four wheeler without even a rudimentary rack-pinion steering system? Meh. Too easy for the cat to dodge...
Uh, that would be a convention for developers of Pen-based GUIs, I assume?
Ironically enough, about the same time that Weird Al's song "The White Stuff" came out (parody of "The Right Stuff", about the middle of Oreo cookies), I was reading a novel from a series my dad was into, The Destroyer (don't recall the exact issue), about a politician who was mixing trace amounts of cocain in Oreo cookies and giving them away at campaign meetings to get people addicted and "feeling good" at his meetings to entice them to vote.
Three cheers for the DoubleStuff!
Regarding the original post, I'd love to see a build-it-yourself standard akin to building your own PC to do various robotic tasks. I'm guessing the technology would be prohibitively expensive for a while, along with gov't regulations to make sure you don't make a robot with motion sensors chase your neighbors down and kill them or something ridiculous.
my geeklog
"Will we see fleets of ORPP robots plowing our streets and mowing our lawns in the future?"
No, you won't.
Unless you manage to provide the $5K+ (each) sensors needed to detect all exceptional cases, you have any breakthroughs.
Detecting a pedestrian in the street with 99.999% reliability needed is HARD. Not mowing over a golf club in you back yard is HARD. Not falling over or running into things is HARD.
As soon as people realize that autonomous hardware needs to react in real time to a dynamic, complex real world, the efforts to compare PCs to robots will stop.
Think about it this way: humans use sensors that are hundreds of times higher resolution, and processors that are thousands of times faster. What makes you think you can do it on the cheap?. And don't start talking about ants or bees! WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU SAW ANYTHING BUT A HUMAN DRIVE A CAR IN ALL CONDITIONS?
Open standards are fine, but don't believe the exponential growth potential for anything but software.
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
Here's one:
Here's another (warning only 128 kbps uplink):
It sure would be nice if people who start these projects would shoot a message off to the comp.robotics.misc news group to try and minimize overlap. The current state of affairs is that there are plenty of projects and very little of the hardware from the projects is interoperable.
-Wayne
Disclaimer: The last URL is mine and I started it back in 1998.
Hmm, That is not the first one, there are lots of other tools around, the most famous one Player/Stage has a well developed architecture and many universities, companies and people around the world are using that.
pooyak.com
It already has - google for "open cola" for example...
Programming is an Art. I am an Artist. Does that mean I get to wear a daft hat?
if it will work on this
hahahahaha, you arantly didn't attend. the 5am shit I saw in the halls spoke otherwise.
"The upgrade of thought is continuous"
I believe that this is the single greatest thing to happen to robotics. This will completely revolutionize the way we live.
(I am just saying that so if it really does happen, I can tell everyone "I told you so")
Yah, you know me.
God spoke to me.
I was at Penguicon 3.0 and have pictures and movies of it here, here, here, and here!
Unfortunately, useful robotics is a highly proprietary market... far worse than the dark Unix years. Nobody who has the hardware wants "open robotics" and worse tend to tie their proprietary hardware to even more proproietary software! The only way to do something like this is "gaurilla" type projects like this one, but unfortunately you need somebody with experience to build hardware.
The main thing you could try to do is come up with Open robot specs using common industry standard pieces as much as possible. Perhaps thru persuasion to support the "open platform" manufactures would open up their software and prices would come down.. therein lies the problem... cheap robots like mindstorms and robosapien just aren't useful...and the parts to make something useful are a thousand $$ leap at this point....
In another life I worked at JPL in robotics and still keep in touch with friends there. They have been struggling for many years to open source much of the robotics software both inside NASA and through all the contract money they send out to universities. Of course the beauracrats are making things difficult. Last I heard there was trouble due to the ban on export of certain technologies and part of it is NASA and University IP lawyers worried about loosing control of that one golden nuggest that might come out of all that $$. In the meantime, every NASA center and university has re-written the same basic robot kinematics, navigation, and machine vision algorithms a dozen times in multiple languages. Many of the guys who wrote a lot of this stuff 15 years ago are now managers and trying to push colaboration and open source using their projects, but it is still hard to move lawyers.
there were actually 4 laws, one which the robots made up themselves later on.
it read long something of the lines of like "robots must protect humanity as a whole" and allowed them to kill some people in order to save humanity (though it did result in the robots destruction)
No doubt this is advanced technology, but maybe the technology itself is not where invention is most beneficial at this point. I believe robotics is a highly under-applied technology.
For instance, the most useful robotic technology I have owned so far is a self-cleaning litter box. It consists of a simple motion detector and timer. However, though these technologies have existed for atleast 50 years, it has only relatively recently made it to market where the consumer can benefit.
I believe this project is geared towards mass-applying existing technology, not inventing AI, which appears to be what you are describing in your post.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
you are right about the carpet with our current wheels. however we built the ORPP1 for outdoor applications with heavy loads. lower friction wheels would have been useful durring the con. Outside the building we got 2 inches of snow this weekend at Penguicon and our chassis cover isn't done yet. I didn't think we needed indoor wheels since the previous weekend was like 80 degrees. (Michigan weather...) I'll have outdoor footage of it performing once finals are over.
"The upgrade of thought is continuous"
haha, "what happens at con stays at con"
"The upgrade of thought is continuous"
No.
University of Washington
Student
Some of the more interesting areas for robotics involve really small clients. When you are dealing with these small clients, weight and power consumption become major issues in ways they just aren't in the PC world. I would be interested in seeing a forth-based implementation of the client for this robotics platform-or at least use of one of the smaller embedded versions of Linux.
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house" - Robert A. Heinlein
I agree with most of your points here. In fact, they're similar to thoughts I've had myself on this subject.
However, there is the question of which jobs are the most boring for a human being. Many people who work indoors dream of switching to something completely different, like landscape gardening. I myself have switched from software development to forestry. Despite losing most of the intellectual stimulation that I thrive on in IT, I loved that simple work much more, and only switched back because of the lack of jobs in that field.
So, I agree that there will always be jobs for humans. But the question arises: will those jobs make us happier, or more miserable?
Nope, animated linux blog avatars ;)
Well, if it's as easy as homegrowing a PC -- then lawnmowing robots under ORPP will be as common as Linux on home computers! The replacement of human workers with robots will approach the pace of the replacement of Windows PCs on the corporate desktop with Linux boxes!
Now is the time to prepare for this imminent threat to factory workers worldwide. Oh, wait...
ever considered a two wheeled platform with a castoring wheel for the third point??? No messing around with chains unless you're into that kind of thing... Direct drive to each wheel.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
If you're interested in a completely open-source robotics platform (where everything is open, including schematics, the firmware, the user libraries, *everything*), visit www.orcboard.org. There's no commercial manufacturer, but there's a community group-ordering effort.
The OrcBoard is used in the MASLab robotics competititon at MIT, and in MIT's cornerstone robotics class. Most folks use the OrcBoard with a linux laptop or embedded PC.
The OrcBoard is just the controller for a robot, not a robot itself, and can control a wide range of robot types and sizes, with lots of different sensor configurations. It's sort of a swiss-army knife for robot construction.
Our current motors require a gear reduction to take real advantage(9 tooth ->16) then (9->60). if not your prototype may charge off at and un managable 15-25 mph (at this stage anyways) and good luck stopping it with out something taking damage... hopefully nothing important. well I'll consider 2 wheels when I see video of a segway style bot in the woods.
"The upgrade of thought is continuous"
From what I have seen of their webpage, it does not look like this platform is currently intended for autonomous control just remote. I still think this is a great idea and I have thought about doing something similar to this but on the electronics side. (designing cheap modular microcontrollers) You run into many cost situations when dealing with autonomous robots (sensors and motors) One problem that I have run across in my brainstorming is spatial resolution, if you are going to have a robot that is mowing the lawn or plowing the street it has to know where it is and GPS just does not have that kind of resolution (in feet/ inches) any thoughts?
"If you like Battlestar Galactica, you're probably a huge nerd." -Stephen Colbert
We only work for a living because work has to be done! If we could automate these processes then we could do more IMPORTANT things like raising families and furthering intellectual discourse. Star Trek anyone?
OT: That is the inherent flaw of the Communist Manifesto- Marx and Engels could not have forseen the rise of technology. When there is no more work to be done there will be no more chains for the proletarians to lose, nor will there be any more proletarians. For more information read Banks' The Culture.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
"the parts to make something useful are a thousand $$ leap at this point."
And when Jobs and Woz started Apple, computers that did useful things cost thousands of dollars and took up as much room as a refrigerator.
Cheap, modular hardware will beget new completely new uses for robots.
A semi-autonomous lawn mower or snow plow doesn't need high-end sensors. A single "do not leave your robot unattended" sticker can compensate for lack of perception or intelligence on the robot's part. The point is to make repetitive jobs easier, not to eliminate humans from the equation.
You can't right now reasonably put a robot on the market without either being a "toy" and drastically under-powered or having high-end sensors like industrial bots.. with all the lawyers nowdays there's just no middle ground. To be blunt, do you want the liability for a "robot snowblower" when your neighbor's 3 year-old comes near it to play? ...didn't think so... a sticker just doesn't make it right
A moderate 1 HP electric motor attached to something can break somebody's arm... I worked with electronics robots that could put a 2x4 thru a brick wall!!! and that's just to move little electronic parts a couple feet!! [and the machine is bolted to the floor!!]
even something like a robot vacuum has to be incredibly failsafe. That Rumba is a toy in the robot world, it can't be too powerful, it has to respond to being stopped, flipped over, wet, something stuck, etc... and this is just a dust-buster on wheels!!!
personally, i think the first robot attempt should be a R2D2-like PC replacement rather than something anthropormorphic. something "safe" and modular that simplifies the digital world for people... think PVR/PDA/Cellphone/PC/home alarm/ etc... in one cute package... espically until we train the public how to act around robots.