Hobbyist One-Ups Sandia Labs

An anonymous reader writes "A robotics hobbyist has created what he claims is the world's smallest autonomous robot. The robot is half the volume of the robots produced by Sandia National Labs in 2001, moves quite a bit faster, and was made using techniques and supplies accessible to anyone." While Sandia Labs has had some time to improve on their original designs, it's still pretty cool to see what one can do at home as well.

Comments

Why not

[Chris_Stankowitz]

Why not place it in a box? I understand he doesn't have the sensor working to stop it from going off the table, why would he not then place it in a box as it looks like the device recognizes an obstacle and changes courses.

Re:Why not

[26199]

Indeed. And it seems somewhat cruel to create something only to immediately cage it!

Much better to let it run free, and make its own mistakes.

Just as pointless as most autonomous research..

[QuantumG]

Why do researchers keep wasting time on these stupid little robots? There's very little actually learnt from making an autonomous robot. So it's not for science. There's very few products that benefit from this research. So it's not for commercialization. It's basically a hobby and, as this hobbyist has shown, best left to the hobbyists. It always surprises me how little scientists actually work together. By now, all these autonomous robot researchers should have put together a simulation package to do their research in. The mechanical engineers, who just can't help getting their hands dirty, can take the designs that have been tested in simulation and ensure they work in hardware.. thus giving the simulation as much credence as hardware, and yet allowing the reproducability necessary for doing actual science.

Re:Yeah, robots are cool and all....

[cyphercell]

Great video, I love how that guy comes out with the card board box, Honda has "men in blue" vs "men in black".
Though, in Asimo's defense let me present Ehibit B

Re:Thats "cute"

[Anonymous Coward]

1.5 Remove from small child's mouth, applying Heimlich maneuver as necessary.

too friggin cool

[bl8n8r]

Think about it... a bright person allowed to:
- concentrate on a project all day long
- without PHB shaking deadlines in front of him
- without being burned out on meetings all day
- without the distraction of phone calls, personalities or politics

imagine what *you* could get done. I'm drawing a parallel to the busy workplace - not in any way do I mean to detract from this guys accomplishment. By all means, he's done something remarkable.

Re:too friggin cool

[Anonymous Coward]

As a person who works on his own research projects and ran home-based businesses alone, it's not as easy as it sounds. There are a lot of distractions, and even there is sheer boredom waiting for something to occur which in a typical environment is filled up with social interactions and those distractions you mention. During those times of boredom or waiting, you end up filling them with some other activity which in turn distracts you; this is not, say, unlike on /. reading an article then reading a post and finding you burned half an hour in total because you decided to respond to some post correcting someone.

Also, this is rather commonplace too. If you look at home-based books or business magazines, a lot of them address the focus issue; it's quite hard to not get distractive or keep on task. (In turn, being distracted is more a sign that your business isn't dong well too; you're not filling orders, etc.) The human mind tends to focus for about 10 minutes at a time then falls out of focus. Even if you can stay focused for extended periods of time, it increases your stress level to stay that way, which in turn leads to extended bouts of getting nothing done; again, those distractions you mention in the jobplace are actually more like downtimes which refocus you back on task. Working alone, you don't have them.

Strange as it sounds, I end up watching a LOT of TV (news, like CNN or CNBC) and reading magazines when I'm doing research; I often do laundry during the afternoon because I'm bored out of my skull awaiting email or waiting for a gel to run. (For the more inciteful, this all is not unlike the stay out home spouse who ends up vacuuming a lot or watching daytime dramas/soaps.) I've got to do something else or I end up going a little off the edge.

And in case someone mentions it, I'm not inattentive or can't focus (I won't go into why, but I consider myself well above average compared to what I've read or observed with prior business partners or associates in the field).

Finally, doing something alone also sometimes means you do more; being in a national lab setting, they have a lot of techs and resources/manpower to handle mundane stuff like washing labware, ordering supplies, receiving supplies, etc. In an individual environment, all of that you have to do.

Hardly Surprising

[DynaSoar]

Why is the "smallest" consistently an issue when it comes to electronics and motorized equipment? They're being made smaller all the time. This will continue to be non-news headlines for some time to come.

I'm not impressed at all. They're all using microcontrolers and ROMS and such. A researcher at Los Alamos developed stepper-motor driven insect-like robots using 12, 14, or 20 transistors that'd "learn" to walk, some with different speeds/strides, with no preprogramming and within a few attempts steps. They even developed what amount to social behavior when operated in groups. The more agile ones that could run would run over the smaller, slower ones. In groups, the latter gathered together and backed themselves into a circle, which prevented the larger, faster ones from running over them. The "beheavior" emerged from some very simple conditions, and stretches the definition of "behavior", much like the light-sensing toy cars exhibited in an old SciAm article. In both cases there's no real learning because there's no collecting of information to be used other than immediate feedback through hardwired circuits. But when you saw a table full of these "bugs" circle the wagons to protect themselves against the attacking "lobsters", it was hard to not think of it in those terms.

"You want to see real artifical intelligence? Make it warm and soft and fuzzy and cuddly." -- Karl Pribram, who understood the fault lies with us, Dear Brutish peoploids, not with our toy cars; it's what we "think" they're "doing".