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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?
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."
...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...
You would be very suprised at the power of a 286. It could easily run a robot. And if you have the math co-processor, you could probably program some AI. Now the CGA or EGA monitors sucked, and the sound sucked. But at its very basic level, it is more powerful that you think.
I bet you could control multiple motors with a 286. Simple on/off commands for moving N/E/S/W.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
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
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.
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...
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.