Open Source Roboticists On a Path to C3P0
by Sam Dean - Sep. 05, 2008Comments (6) | Trackback URL- Related Blog Posts
- Do Open Source Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?
If you happen to own a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, you already have a robot in your life. (I have a Roomba, and highly recommend it--available at Target.) Roomba is a classic example of how a robot doesn't have to be humanoid to be useful. In the open source community, though, there are several efforts to develop robots that look and/or act like humans, performing interesting and useful tasks. They're not C3PO at this stage of their development, but they show tremendous promise, especially if more open source contributions are made to the projects. Here are a couple of good examples to take a gander at.
Willow Garage is an open source robotics project that originated at Stanford University. Robots being developed with the project run ROS (Robot Operating System) software. The operating system comes complete with tutorials, a developer's guide, and more--all at the link just provided.
PR2 is the mobile hardware design for Willow Garage robots, featuring stereo and laser sensors. It's shown at left. Stanford hosts a series of highly entertaining and interesting videos here, showing PR2 robots performing tasks such as tidying up a room and retrieving beer from a refrigerator.
Senior citizens are a big part of the target audience that Willow Garage is aiming for. "All industrialized countries are facing aging populations that require assistance and care to remain independent into old age. By 2020 close to 20 percent of the US population will be over 65," the project leaders say. "These numbers are even higher in Western European and Asian countries." Willow Garage is aiming to produce several types of assistive robots.
We covered the iCub open source robot, seen at left, once before, here. The iCub, unlike many less advanced robots, is capable of learning from experience. It looks like a metallic, 2-year old child, and it has sensors in its hands, eyes and elsewhere that help it navigate its surroundings. There is an open source hardware design for iCub, and an open source software platform.
Who says C3PO and R2D2 can't come from the open source community?
balakrishna korrapati uses OStatic to support Open Source, ask and answer questions and stay informed. What about you?
AI and robotics have just not lived up to their potential, unfortunately. Now with an open source effort, let's see if there is more progress that can be had....
The day there exists an autonomous errand capable robot, is the birthday of the perfect thief or assassin.
We already have thieves and assassins, so why not have something help lift humanity out of menial labor? I'm looking forward to being able to get one.
I have been improving a model for simulating neurons and cognition for years now. At this point, there are two clear obstacles: (1) not fully understanding what forms hyperpolarized receptors; and (2) poor physical environment for testing. Simulated physics are just too much to program in necessary detail and are subject to large rounding errors.. Real physical environments (i.e. robotics) are just not available. Granted, many in robotics will tell you about numerous kits and projects but they all use exceptionally weak microcontrollers and do not have the rich feedback required for a neural system. All we really need is a robotics platform that operates off something connectable to a computer, such as a PCI card; and return signals for how much physical resistance is encountered when moving a stepper motor.
It's the gap between software and hardware people that prevents a whole new generation in development in robotics and machine intelligence.
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