For the mechanical side of things, consider buying a cheap radio controlled vehicle and modifying that for autonomous operation. For about $50 you get the batteries, motors and transmission done for you - building them from scratch can be more problematic than you might think.
On models I've bought, replacing the controller was as simple as cutting four tracks on a PCB and connecting them straight to a microcontroller. This leaves you with plenty of money left for sensors and processors.
I would suggest you get in contact with the Fighting Robot Association who look after the interests of combat robot builders now that Robot Wars has finished. Their forum would be a good place to ask your question. We spend a lot of time discussing how to make combat robotics safer, and I think safety will be your first concern too, so please get in touch.
I use the 16F871s which are cheap (2.50 ukp each, less in bulk - which is good, as I tend to blow them up quite often) and built my own programmer using the instructions at http://www.emicros.com/2bit_article.htm
The highest cost was the ZIF socket, other than that it's just a few resistors and transistors. The Assembler development environment is free from the manufacturer (www.microchip.com).
I'm doing a similar thing, using a very cheap R/C car with infrared sensors to avoid obstacles. It's a great way to avoid a lot of time and effort building the mechanical parts of a robot.
Diesel engines can also be run on vegetable oil, which makes them even more environmentally friendly. Most existing diesel engines require the oil to be pre-heated, or converted to biodiesel by the addition of a few chemicals, but other than that they can run well, in fact in some cases better than on the fossil fuel diesel. This is made difficult in the UK by fuel duty laws - what would the legal situation be in the US?
I'll accept that you may not want to use the term 'Robot' for ROVs, but please don't call them toys. A hell of a lot of effort goes into designing combat machines. AI is a different problem to mechanical engineering but it's no more intellectual.
Ok, the cost isn't such a great boast. But steel wedges are not the winningest designs, certainly not in my experience. I haven't even seen such a design on the UK robot circuit for years. Working steel isn't a particularly challenging job but designing the chassis certainly is. One needs to design a drive train which can support a 100kg robot and withstand other 100kg robots falling on it, sometimes from several metres in the air. Getting good radio reception inside a steel shell with several large electric motors and no protruding aerials is challenging. Controlling motors which draw hundreds of amps is challenging. Designing weapons which will cut through 5mm plate steel is challenging, although many exist. Doing all this while keeping the competition safe for roboteers and audiences is very challenging.
Identifying targets and not falling down stairs certainly is challenging, no doubt about that. But please don't write off ROV builders' efforts as "remote-controlled cars".
No offence, but you have just demonstrated that you have no idea what goes into building a combat robot. These things take months to build and thousands of dollars, if you've got good facilities. At this stage, the challenges are more mechanical engineering rather than in artifical intelligence, but they're no less intellectual. The presentation on BattleBots (and Robot Wars in the UK) is very low-brow and doesn't give a good impression of the nature of the sport.
Speaking as a robot (ROV) builder, it is something a lot of us would like to do, but it's more difficult than you might think just to get a combat robot to move reliably (18 months and about $4000 in my case) even with a human guiding it. The challenges involved are mostly in mechanical engineering. Most of the Slashdot audience are probably more interested in AI challenges, but the challenges are there all the same and no easier to overcome.
Mine does. It has a scrolling LED display to insult opponents (not pics of it, unfortunately)... unfortunately the first display got destroyed by an opponent's flywheel very quickly.
The mini-ITX still needs a normal ATX power supply (+/- 5V, +/- 12V) - generally you will get a solid state power supply that takes 12V as an input which takes up a bit more space.
I can't even see the power connector on the nano-ITX - if that runs straight off 12V that's great.
In the UK at least (where this article is talking about) you can still buy a mobile phone and the credit top-up vouchers for it in cash and use it without ever giving the phone company your name or address.
Granted, someone clever might be able to identify you by your voice or the numbers you dial but otherwise they only have a number, not your name.
Re:Saw this one coming when..
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think the idea is that with higher voltages you need lower currents to do the same job. The danger they're talking about here is not from electrocution but from overheating and sparking.
People have lost fingers due to getting their wedding rings between battery wires. At three times the voltage, that line could be fused at one third the current, so there's much less chance of damage. Starter motors, which aren't fused at all in my experience, could conceivably be fused at 42V.
Moral issues aside, this seems like a poor way to monitor people. What's to stop you recording some video of you in the house, and playing it back while you're out? Didn't the designers watch Speed?
I use the 16F871. Cost is about 3 pounds ($5) each. Very well documented, needs very few external components and can be programmed straight from the parallel port with five resistors and a transistor. It includes an A/D, serial port, PWM generator and can source 25mA per pin.
Another explanation is that the article isn't quite correct. I would expect that the extra load causes the generators to slow down, and the lower frequency is an involuntary consequence of demand outstripping supply, rather than a decision by the producers.
There are many excellent single-player scrolling text based adventure games and they are still being developed. However, you are unlikely to appeal to the masses with a text or character based interface as most people expect games to have fast-moving graphics. Also, developing a good text interface can be at least as difficult as developing a graphics engine.
Good examples are Graham Nelson's Curses and anything by Magnetic Scrolls, although the latter are a little tricky to find and get running on modern OSs.
Slashdot Mirror
For the mechanical side of things, consider buying a cheap radio controlled vehicle and modifying that for autonomous operation. For about $50 you get the batteries, motors and transmission done for you - building them from scratch can be more problematic than you might think.
On models I've bought, replacing the controller was as simple as cutting four tracks on a PCB and connecting them straight to a microcontroller. This leaves you with plenty of money left for sensors and processors.
This page claims the current record of the Shell Eco-Marathon is 10,240 miles per gallon. (This may well be UK gallons, not US)
_ 2003/exhibitor/team_crocodile.htm
http://www-outreach.phy.cam.ac.uk/physics_at_work
I would suggest you get in contact with the Fighting Robot Association who look after the interests of combat robot builders now that Robot Wars has finished. Their forum would be a good place to ask your question. We spend a lot of time discussing how to make combat robotics safer, and I think safety will be your first concern too, so please get in touch.
Actually I found it very interesting - up until the point the race actually took place. The development is at least as important as the result to me.
Yep,
I use the 16F871s which are cheap (2.50 ukp each, less in bulk - which is good, as I tend to blow them up quite often) and built my own programmer using the instructions at http://www.emicros.com/2bit_article.htm
The highest cost was the ZIF socket, other than that it's just a few resistors and transistors. The Assembler development environment is free from the manufacturer (www.microchip.com).
I'm doing a similar thing, using a very cheap R/C car with infrared sensors to avoid obstacles. It's a great way to avoid a lot of time and effort building the mechanical parts of a robot.
As I've said before I'd define 10,240mpg as good mileage ... not quite a practical production car yet but it shows what's possible.
Diesel engines can also be run on vegetable oil, which makes them even more environmentally friendly. Most existing diesel engines require the oil to be pre-heated, or converted to biodiesel by the addition of a few chemicals, but other than that they can run well, in fact in some cases better than on the fossil fuel diesel. This is made difficult in the UK by fuel duty laws - what would the legal situation be in the US?
I'll accept that you may not want to use the term 'Robot' for ROVs, but please don't call them toys. A hell of a lot of effort goes into designing combat machines. AI is a different problem to mechanical engineering but it's no more intellectual.
Ok, the cost isn't such a great boast. But steel wedges are not the winningest designs, certainly not in my experience. I haven't even seen such a design on the UK robot circuit for years.
Working steel isn't a particularly challenging job but designing the chassis certainly is. One needs to design a drive train which can support a 100kg robot and withstand other 100kg robots falling on it, sometimes from several metres in the air.
Getting good radio reception inside a steel shell with several large electric motors and no protruding aerials is challenging.
Controlling motors which draw hundreds of amps is challenging.
Designing weapons which will cut through 5mm plate steel is challenging, although many exist.
Doing all this while keeping the competition safe for roboteers and audiences is very challenging.
Identifying targets and not falling down stairs certainly is challenging, no doubt about that. But please don't write off ROV builders' efforts as "remote-controlled cars".
No offence, but you have just demonstrated that you have no idea what goes into building a combat robot. These things take months to build and thousands of dollars, if you've got good facilities. At this stage, the challenges are more mechanical engineering rather than in artifical intelligence, but they're no less intellectual. The presentation on BattleBots (and Robot Wars in the UK) is very low-brow and doesn't give a good impression of the nature of the sport.
Speaking as a robot (ROV) builder, it is something a lot of us would like to do, but it's more difficult than you might think just to get a combat robot to move reliably (18 months and about $4000 in my case) even with a human guiding it. The challenges involved are mostly in mechanical engineering. Most of the Slashdot audience are probably more interested in AI challenges, but the challenges are there all the same and no easier to overcome.
Mine does. It has a scrolling LED display to insult opponents (not pics of it, unfortunately) ... unfortunately the first display got destroyed by an opponent's flywheel very quickly.
this does offer a pretty interesting blow to free expression
Surely free expression grants Adobe the right to put these features in their software if they wish?
This may be of interest, Bruce Simpson appeared in an epsiode in the current series of Scrapheap Challenge (the UK version of Junkyard Wars)
Um, no, it wouldn't play chess well either. Your point?
To put things in perspective - the highest recorded for a passenger vehicle is 10240 miles per gallon.
a t_work_2003/exhibitor/team_crocodile.htm
http://www.phy.cam.ac.uk/camphy/outreach/physics_
The mini-ITX still needs a normal ATX power supply (+/- 5V, +/- 12V) - generally you will get a solid state power supply that takes 12V as an input which takes up a bit more space.
I can't even see the power connector on the nano-ITX - if that runs straight off 12V that's great.
In the UK at least (where this article is talking about) you can still buy a mobile phone and the credit top-up vouchers for it in cash and use it without ever giving the phone company your name or address.
Granted, someone clever might be able to identify you by your voice or the numbers you dial but otherwise they only have a number, not your name.
I think the idea is that with higher voltages you need lower currents to do the same job. The danger they're talking about here is not from electrocution but from overheating and sparking.
People have lost fingers due to getting their wedding rings between battery wires. At three times the voltage, that line could be fused at one third the current, so there's much less chance of damage. Starter motors, which aren't fused at all in my experience, could conceivably be fused at 42V.
Moral issues aside, this seems like a poor way to monitor people. What's to stop you recording some video of you in the house, and playing it back while you're out? Didn't the designers watch Speed?
I use the 16F871. Cost is about 3 pounds ($5) each. Very well documented, needs very few external components and can be programmed straight from the parallel port with five resistors and a transistor. It includes an A/D, serial port, PWM generator and can source 25mA per pin.
Another explanation is that the article isn't quite correct. I would expect that the extra load causes the generators to slow down, and the lower frequency is an involuntary consequence of demand outstripping supply, rather than a decision by the producers.
There are many excellent single-player scrolling text based adventure games and they are still being developed. However, you are unlikely to appeal to the masses with a text or character based interface as most people expect games to have fast-moving graphics. Also, developing a good text interface can be at least as difficult as developing a graphics engine.
Good examples are Graham Nelson's Curses and anything by Magnetic Scrolls, although the latter are a little tricky to find and get running on modern OSs.
Yes, it's just the Citroen was the first one I'd heard of with tilting headlights, probably as I live in Europe. Thanks for the link.