bigbot

Posted June 2, 2008 by kym 4 Comments »

There is up-coming news of some pretty neat and very cheap big robot bases.  Hacking is involved! :)

The pic is an "urban" robot I’ll be working on, on and off, for the next few m. It’s supposed to be a prototype "working stiff" and the brief involves moving around outdoors, and moving around indoors but normally in dangerous conditions.

The attached vid is of the MAARs robot that got cashiered from the US military forces in Iraq after it moved its weapon in the direction of friendly forces. The manual for the bot claims it comes programmable with no-fire zones to prevent accidents, but there seems to be an unexpected and disconcerting element of free will to it all.

4 Comments

  • On 06.04.08 ash said:

    Hey Kym :)

    Are they actually disappearing or not appearing in the first place?

    They used to not get pushed to the front page automatically (not sure if that was what was causing the issue) but now they should show up straight away.

    I couldn’t see anything in the spam cache when I last checked but who knows that the hell is going on in the depths of Drupal’s codebase :)

     

     

  • On 06.04.08 ash said:

    Also, cool pic! :) Is that a 360deg camera lens on there?

  • On 06.04.08 kym said:

    I wasn’t too fussed about things not appearing on the front page. I trust the editorial controls. :)

    No, the articles get typed in and momentarily appear on the “recent blog posts”. At one point there was a message left after the “publish” button saying the “moderator” would OK them later.

    In the last couple of weeks an article or 2 has appeared and hung around for a day or so, and then disappeared.

    I’ve turned off any of my automatic akismet editing, not that it probably has anything to do with it since it says “comment moderation”.

    Anyway, the latest blog post has survived a few days, so I guess whatever may have been wrong is fixed.

    Maybe some of those hackers managed to delete things in revenge for akismet?

    I dunno.

  • On 06.05.08 kymhorsell said:

    It’s an el-cheapo low-res 3d laser scanner. 

    I’ve seen good ones (i.e. suitable for localisation rather than reverse-engineering some tiny nuts and bolts) for $5000 usd, but this one costs around $500 usd new and I picked one up for $300 usd.

    You can home-brew  a pretty good one with an avr8, a servo, a cheap webcam and a laser pointer.

    See:

    http://www.muellerr.ch/engineering/laserscanner/

    http://www.simple3d.com/