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Arduino Branches Out, With a Plug-and-Program Robot
mikejuk writes "The new Arduino robot looks a bit like a robot vacuum cleaner, but it has a lot more going for it and it certainly doesn't suck — well not unless you add an air pump to it. As always, the Arduino Robot is completely open source and comes as an easy to assemble kit involving no soldering, just some plugging in of components. It consists of two circular boards, 19cm in diameter, each with its own Arduino controller. They fit together to create a stack about 10cm tall. The bottom board has two wheels and motors which allow it to move in any direction. The top board contains lots of sensors and a central display. The two communicate via a serial connection. There is also a lot of space for expansion. There is a new library which can be downloaded to help write programs for this fairly sophisticated robot. There is only one big problem with the Arduino robot — you can't buy one at the moment. If you really can't wait, until early July when they should start shipping from the Arduino shop and from distributors, then you will have to get to the Maker Faire San Mateo (May 17-19) where they are being demonstrated and sold."
For $250, http://arcbotics.com/products/hexy/
I'm entertained, but I think my cats hate me now.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Waaallllllet
Table-ized A.I.
It looks big enough to carry a raspberry pi. Use that for the heavy duty computing and have the arduino control the servos.
the shape of things to come Thymio II https://aseba.wikidot.com/en:thymio any of this page too http://store.irobot.com/family/index.jsp?categoryId=2501652&s=A-ProductAge
There are already dumbots in that range. Any new robot should come with at least an Allwinner ARM CPU ($7) and a camera as standard. That's enough for some vision processing and at least 2D SLAM. The hardware to put some real smarts in a little bot is now cheap and there's enough open source software available to get started on making it smart.
What a lot of idiots like Animats just don't get about Arduino is that Arduino managed to get a fun package out on the market anyone can get started with and can get started with without having to rely on the type of people who snort derisively at anyone who cannot tell resistors apart by smell.
Just buy a kit and you can experiment for fun in a way that is fun and does not involve the need to first lean how to measure voltages until you want to.
Yes there are countless other systems out there, both more powerful and invariable connected to communities that are exclusive rather then inclusive. Ask on an Arduino forum for stuff anyone knows about as beginner and you get an answer. It is the same reason Linux beat BSD and PHP beats say Java or Ruby. Not because they are necessarly better products but because more people can get started with them.
Plenty of people who mess with these kit robots just want to mess about, use them as toys, have a bit of fun. They don't need massive parallel processing or sensors with miles of range, they do not dream of making a spy bot. They want to have a toy that follows their hand or make their own beer cannon or just see some leds light up. I know to anyone who has a full soldering stations it might sound incredible but for the majority, first having to spend a weekend soldering a kit together is NOT what they want if they buy a diy robot kit. They want to spend maybe an hour at most and then have something that moves. From there they may or may not advance. 2D SLAM? Jezus Christ Animats, just how sad are you as a human being?
Most people don't want to instantly have to develop the next generation mars rover. They want to have some fun! PLAY. If you like remote control aircraft, you start with a simpel plastic model and have fun and MAYBE someday you will go further OR NOT! Maybe start with a click and play model train set like Kato and MAYBE one day move on to making your own tracks from scratch. MAYBE. But from beginner to expert there is a lot of room for simply having fun, for enjoying toys at the level you are comfortable at and are willing to spend the time learning. And Arduino sits there are the beginner entry, middle level, open and welcoming and not demanding people first follow a 4yr electronics course to get anything done and because of that it is a massive hit. And it is getting people involved in messing with electronics who never would have before and it is GREAT!
And in the background are the forever alone losers trying to point out there more powerful toys with impossible to read manuals and secret society forums where you can only post if you first lurked for two years as an apprentice.
It is kinda sad in a way because it is just basic business sense. You want to sell something, you got to make it accesible. Arduino is the next step up from Lego Mindstorm. They got what made Mindstorm such a gigantic hit, an open accessible friendly platform where you can either remain as a fun loving beginner or use as a stepping stone.
And forever aloners like Animats will be crying "but we got more cpu power" as the rest of the planet has fun.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I have a robot vacuum cleaner and it's more than a toy. I really cherish the thing. It's great. This is indeed a bit close to the specs of a robot vacuum cleaner. Now of course it's potentially much more than that. I certainly get that. That's nice but . . .
The other day I was looking around at Aliexpress. As a matter of fact, I was buying a ten pack of ATMega328s in the DIP 28 format since I'm an Arduino lover. As I was checking out I got one of those ads at that bottom saying: Other people who bought ten packs of ATMega328s also bought
And there was a totally bad ass looking robot hand. The thing looked like a piece of art. It was a human hand made of stainless steel wire basically. A pretty thing where every little finger moved independently. Sexy little thing. I hadn't thought to search for off-the-shelf robot hands.
But I was inspired to do so and I was quite impressed. There was a whole range of six degree of freedom hands for less than two hundred bucks. The down side was the controllers didn't look all that friendly. I'm just a hobbyist but I know from my investigations that industrial robots tend to use these things called teaching pendants which are basically like macro recorders that just take the input from the servos and record it so that you can rough-in a certain manipulation and then starting with that you can go to and editor and fine tune the functionality. So having an open and friendly user community for something like that would be amazing.
I'd hope to see Arduino putting something like that to work although I can imagine that perhaps a teaching pendant application might involve something a bit more beefy like the BeagleBone Black or RasPi.
An application like an open source robot hand massage would be the beginning of something interesting.
Wake me up when they've got something a little more all-terrain. This thing couldn't negotiate it's way over a power cord, if it can even negotiate the pile in my carpeting (which looks doubtful)
you can't buy one at the moment.
Ok...
get to the Maker Faire San Mateo (May 17-19) where they are being demonstrated and sold.
So which is it? Are they not being sold, or are they being sold?
This guy built a self-driving car powered by an android phone and a laptop. He did something similar with a raspberry pi in place of the phone. I find this fascinating. In essence, he taught the car to drive by driving it around a black track delineated by white boundaries, with the computer recording a basic video of his driving technique. The neural network was then trained to drive like a human. The neural network ideas were contained in this free Stanford Machine Learning Course by Andrew Ng. It would be unbelievably cool to me if someone could make this technology more accessible to a wider audience.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Real men code their own FPGAs and ASICs
OK, a fanboy from the Arduno cult has been heard from.
Back in 1979, Milton Bradley introduced the Big Trak. This was the first mass-market battery-motor-wheels-CPU toy 'bot. Since then, there have been more machines in that category and slightly above it, like Lego Mindstorms.
It's been three decades since the Big Trak. There hasn't been much progress above that level in mass-market devices. A Roomba is only slightly smarter than a BigTrak. Mobile phones, on the other hand, have advanced somewhat since the late 1970s. R/C toys have become much better, but most of that reflects improved batteries, and the good stuff is still at a rather high price point.
There's a new BigTrak from 2010. It has an optional camera and a WiFi connection, and will connect to an iPhone. It has the basic hardware to be an intelligent autonomous vehicle. But it's no smarter than the original BigTrak. If you want something as dumb as a BigTrak, you can buy one of these. No assembly required. Ages 6 and up.
Here's what's possible today at the hobbyist level: an autonomous paintball robot. Runs a maze and hits targets. Uses a Kinect as a sensor. Has 2D SLAM; builds a map of its environment. That's what new products should be doing.