Subject:
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Re: Design
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Thu, 1 Dec 2005 21:37:53 GMT
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Original-From:
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Bruce Boyes <bboyes@^StopSpam^systronix.com>
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Viewed:
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1634 times
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At 12:57 PM 12/1/2005, you wrote:
> In lugnet.robotics, PeterBalch <PeterBalch@compuserve.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Most people are happy if their robot can get from A to B without getting
> > stuck behind the sofa. And that includes 99% of universities. Sure, NASA
> > may talk about building self-repairing robots that can diagnose their own
> > faults but no-one has actually built a real robot complicated enough to
> > benefit from that kind of philosophising. It's fun to speculate but it's a
> > futile daydream until we've got robots that actually work.
In three years in the CS department of the Univ of Utah, my students
were able to do much more than this using Lego mechanicals and JCX
prototype hardware - autonomous checker and soccer playing bots, with
some pretty advanced machine vision (CMUcam and some extensive
post-processing). Sure, the simple problems (battery life for one)
persist, but simple line followers have been ho-hum for a while.
A small group of us just submitted a proposal for JavaOne, including
a live demo of a "usefully intelligent" (maybe I just coined that
term to be more practical than the more vague 'artificial
intelligence') swarm of Lego based robots.
Here's some old info on the class:
http://www.cs.utah.edu/classes/cs4710/
This team did a sonar mapping robot which was really cool:
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~phichian/WiJoNa/
it scanned a sonar module like a radar antenna, divided its
environment into grids, and filled in objects in the grid if there
was a persistent "hard" echo from that portion of the grid. It used
an RF modem to report this scan back to the PC which ran a Java app
which drew a map which looked a lot like a radar screen. One of these
students went on into the Navy to enter pilot training. Their Java
source codes are still online.
So is this hockeybot with machine vision:
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~bholt/cs4710/
I've given a couple of public presentations on these classes, with
video clips of the final projects, and people (typically other
faculty members) have been amazed that students completed these sorts
of projects in one semester.
The secret is a powerful "brain" with a productive language (Java)
and some good assortment of I/O boards. You won't get all this for
$200. In fact we have had a devil of a time getting it into
production, period. But there's hope for some announcement this month.
Next month I'm at the OMG robotics standards meeting, and you can be
assured that there is some impressive technology represented by the
companies involved in that effort. We're still in the robotics stone
age, but progress is being made.
The recent Robonexus was a mix of the mundane/boring, remote
controlled non-robots, and some very exciting autonomous technology
(which did not attract the limelight). Go figure...
Regards
Bruce Boyes
------- WWW.SYSTRONIX.COM ----------
Real embedded Java and much more
+1-801-534-1017 Salt Lake City, USA
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Design
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| (...) For info on some Robots that seem to work see: (URL) of the US Lugnet people (which I think is most of you?) seen any of these? Thomas (19 years ago, 1-Dec-05, to lugnet.robotics)
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