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Science Technology

Small-Scale Warrior Robot Truck 116

Posted by timothy from the going-to-sue-over-that-name dept.
Phoebus0 writes "The Oregon Health and Science University's Department of Computer Science and Engineering has been developing what looks like a massive robot truck of the future - only on a slightly smaller scale. It appears to use some fairly cool stuff on a really small platform, literally. It's called the Timbot, and is supposed to be able to act and get around independently, with only high-level instructions. The robot is running embedded Linux with 802.11b ethernet, a micro pan/tilt camera, and a bunch of other sensors. It's partially funded by DARPA, and the current press release can be found here. I want one!" I hope they commericialize and sell this, looks much better than my old Tonka truck.
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Small-Scale Warrior Robot Truck More

Small-Scale Warrior Robot Truck

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  • TIMMAY!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by dildatron ( 611498 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2002 @04:24PM (#4419257)
    I know it looks more like an rc truck [ogi.edu], but with a name like "Timbot", I just picture a wheel-chair-looking robot bumping into walls all the time shouting "Timmay! ... Timmay!"
  • The movie "Flash" ?
  • The robot is running embedded Linux with 802.11b ethernet, a micro pan...
    A micro pan? Cool. Can I program it to bring me breakfast in bed?

  • Bad idea (Score:2, Informative)

    by delta407 ( 518868 )
    a massive robot truck of the future ... running embedded Linux with 802.11b ethernet
    So, wait, we have a massive robot truck controlled by 802.11b? Sounds like a great plan. After all, 802.11b sports Wired Equivalent Privacy [berkeley.edu], which we all know lives up to its name.

    </biting-sarcasm>

  • Oh the possibilites... (Score:4, Funny)

    by ElQuesoEsViejo ( 81308 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2002 @04:28PM (#4419299)
    If they can get it to brew a pot of coffee, we can fire half the employees at my office, yay!
  • Doesn't anyone care about all the Redneck, Snaggle Toothed Monster Truck drivers who will be out of a job when Monster Truck Rallies are no longer Human Operated. In the year 2000, all monster trucks will be controlled by Slashdot Techies using Remote Controls.

    What is this World Coming To!

  • BigTrax (Score:4, Funny)

    by DCram ( 459805 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2002 @04:28PM (#4419309)
    Wow..
    So much cooler than my old BigTrax that I used to spend oodles of time coding up to run around my house and drop legos and such.

    Now what I need is one of these and one of those new vacume bots that will clean my house for me. Man just think of the day when we can sit around like the jetsons and have little bots do everything for us.. MMMMMM.. My mouth salivates at the thought of my lazyness.
    • Nooooooo! Stop spending your precious energy on drooling!

  • Mine is way better (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hayzeus ( 596826 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2002 @04:30PM (#4419321) Homepage
    Mine can be controlled from the web as well, has a snappier paint job, and implements "graceful degradation" every few days when it looses a wheel. See the sig...

  • Tonka (Score:2, Insightful)

    by mustangdavis ( 583344 )
    I hope they commericialize and sell this, looks much better than my old Tonka truck.

    You must have REALLY been hard on your toys!

    But in order for the Timbot to "make it" on the open market, they're DEFINATELY going to need to do some marketing ... the concept is cool, but that thing is UGLY! You'd think they'd have enough money left in their grant to put a cheesy plastic cover on the top of it ... putting the PC on the board just isn't very stylish. If they really wanted to do it with some style, take a page out of Dr. Emmitt Brown's book and cover it with stainless steal and make it look like a DeLorian!

    But I don't think this toy would last half as long as your Tonka truck did in its current state ... we're gonna need titainium!!

    • rm -rf /bin/laden

      Or maybe:

      chmod a+x /bin/laden
      ?

      • Re:Tonka (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        rm -rf /bin/laden

        Or maybe:
        chmod a+x /bin/laden ?

         First, you must:
        #locate /bin/laden
  • This thing reminds me of this funky toy truck I had as a kid. You could program it to perform basic movements and navigation. It also had a little cargo carrier that it towed. Was it called Bigfoot? can't remember. Either way I'm pretty sure DARPA didn't finance it.
  • I didn't get much of the main page before it was slashdotted, but i do recognize a Traxxas E-Maxx in there somewhere.

    I've got the nitro version, a T-Maxx.. Incredible fun.
    • My neighbor has got himself an E-Maxx. Super fun. Fastest ready-to-run electric truck I've played with. Puts my modified Traxxas Stampede to shame (though it rolls awfully easy).

      On the topic of robotic trucks... I mounted a Handy Board [handyboard.com] on my stampede (The Handy Board is a 68HC11-based controller board designed for experimental mobile robotics; created by Fred Martin of MIT), along with a Sony infrared proximity detector... and had it wandering around my basement. Fun stuff, but one detector is not enough... it kept running into stuff at 10 MPH; some sort of sonar range finder would be better...

  • Slashdotted in six minutes (Score:3, Funny)

    by HawkinsD ( 267367 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2002 @04:33PM (#4419358)
    Are there records kept for the amount of time the typical Slashdot victim-server lives after being posted?

    That might make in interesting resarch project.
  • Mini RC cars, mini robot trucks.

    What's next?

    By the way, anybody else remember Megaweapon from "Warrior of the Lost World" with that guy from "The Paper Chase" and Persis Khambata? Now there was a robot truck!

    • And now all the MST3K lines form the one time I saw the film are coming to mind.

      "Euwww. His tongue is like a side of beef!"

      "No, really, you can go. I won't miss you. Please stop kissing me goodbye."

      "YES! The megaweapon killed the annoying talking bike!"
      "Yeah Megaweapon!"

      "How dangerous can it be. At the speed it's going they can just walk away."
      • The say Megaweapons one bad motha ...shut your mouth ...I'm just talkin' about Megaweapon

        It's called the Square Master. You see, the Square Master allows you to maximize your human potential because Square Master uses one of nature's most perfect shapes for your perfect shape.

        Joel: Let Bitter Sweethearts do it. Like, this one says GET OUT.
        Crow: OWIE OWIE OWIE.
        Servo: LOVE ME.
        Joel: STILL MAD.
        Crow: MY NEEDS.
        Servo: Oh, here we go. BITE ME.
        Joel: DROP HIM.
        Crow: I'M TESTED.
        Servo: THAT HAIR.
        Joel: CAN'T LEAVE THE COUNTY.
        Crow: Perfect for interventions, counseling sessions, or awkward dating situations!
        Servo: Look at this. WEIRD FACE.
        Joel: YOU'LL DO.
        Crow: LIKE A BROTHER.

        I'd go into the Taj Mahal in my minibike and just spin donuts!

  • Massive Truck, but Smaller Scale? (Score:4, Funny)

    by SniffleBear ( 604984 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2002 @04:34PM (#4419368)
    Does that make it a normal sized truck?
  • smaller massive?

    Isn't that like jumbo shrimp?

  • Hmmm...Nostalgia (Score:5, Funny)

    by da3dAlus ( 20553 ) <dustin.grauNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday October 09, 2002 @04:37PM (#4419397) Homepage Journal
    Let's see....robot + truck...
    = REAL LIFE TRANSFORMERS!

    Cool. My very own Optimus Prime. How much?

  • Co-operation? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jukal ( 523582 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2002 @04:44PM (#4419437) Journal
    It seems that plenty of these robot projects are now beginning to be able "to act and get around independently" - atleast for specific purposes. But is there projects that would have looked at this from the different "ant" perspective. I mean, that the bots would build a co-operative network and use distributed intelligence to achieve the task most efficient possible way. I don't know anything about the matter - but I would think that the 2nd does not need the first - ie. we would not need to have a robot that can work independently before we can have many robots than can work co-operatively. (Just think about your local nerd, but him near computer - great, make him decide what to eat or come to a meeting in time (core dump) - with co-operation he/she might actually achieve these tasks)).
    • There's plenty of work on this - it is just done in simulations in an artificial world. It's much faster to prototype this way than to actually have physical robots. Many different designs and algorithms can be tried quickly and fairly inexpensivly. The lessons learned in these simulations will no doubt be "downloaded" into the "positronic matrices" of all future androids :)
    • Take a look at U of MN Center for Distributed Robotics [umn.edu]. They've been working on a rover/scout plan for a few years now, and were featured on slashdot a year and a half or so ago, but I can't find the article.

  • Video at the expense of navigation (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sssmashy ( 612587 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2002 @04:49PM (#4419470)
    ...if the Timbot needs to perform expensive calculations to ensure that it avoids an obstacle, then it can slow down and reduce the amount of time that it spends processing video. Once it is past the obstacle, Timbot can reallocate its resources, increasing the quality of the video images that it transmits, and moving faster again...

    The Timbot has enough to think about... why waste its precious processor resources on a video feed? The Timbot doesn't need video to get around. It could rely entirely on its sonar, plus a simple still picture every second or so for the visual analysis algorithms.

    To get that cool "first-person" footage of the Timbot moving around, slap an XCam on top of it. Meanwhile, focus on sonar (and possibly even lidar?) for the navigation systems.

    • The software for the original OGI'maBot2 (2nd gen, Timbot is 4th) was designed for teleoperation. The software was designed so that tradeoffs could be made between the quality of the video feed and its frame-rate. The tradeoff was based on the current speed of the vehicle, because a fixed frame rate at high speed means you're moving a large distance between frames. The actual contents of the frames don't have to be as sharp, you just need them more often.

      The TimBot pushes more into the realm of autonomous vehicles. I suspect it's still using roughly the same code-base (the Quasar pipeline, upon which GStreamer is based, conceptually), so there's still video transmission going on, for failsafe if nothing else. The video is sent over 802.11b because OGI has (and has had for a long time) a campus-wide wireless cloud. This bot can range anywhere around campus, so x10 video doesn't work.

      I would be interested to know what their failsafes are, onboard. One time I was driving OGI'maBot2 around several rooms away (took me 5+sec running to get there) when the computer died, leaving the motor running full-speed backwards. It backed *underneath* a desk, destroying an ISA slot on the motherboard (bent over). TimBot is a lot more compact and rugged-looking, but still susceptible.

  • This raises an entirely new issue... (Score:5, Funny)

    by jcrb ( 187104 ) <jcrbNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Wednesday October 09, 2002 @04:52PM (#4419505) Homepage

    how the heck do you warchalk a moving access point????

    Someone needs to go out and start printing the bumper stickers now... "Public 802.11 on board"

    And police cars with 802.11 would be what then? "Honey tankers"?

  • Heh, it's finally a monster truck (Score:5, Informative)

    by Omega Hacker ( 6676 ) <omega AT omegacs DOT net> on Wednesday October 09, 2002 @04:58PM (#4419556)
    I built the first two versions of this project, originally called "OGI'maBot", while I worked at the Oregon Graduate Institute (OGI). The first was a laptop on a trailer behind a manually controlled RC car. The second, OGI'maBot2, was an AT motherboard on top of a rally-truck RC chassis. The most expensive single part was the power converter to run the motherboard. The "TimBot" is the 4th iteration of the project AFAICT, the third one being somewhere in between.

    You can get more info on the 2nd generation at http://www.omegacs.net/~omega/ogimabot2/, but please be kind, it's my home DSL line.

    The software was very cool, the infrastructure directly led to the GStreamer project that I started while working there. I guess I should go back out there soon and have a closer look at this thing ;-)

  • Open Source.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Tsali ( 594389 )
    haiku

    Sure, it runs Linux,
    But will their interop sys
    be open source? I hope!

    /haiku

    • Rats.... screwed up the last line...

      How about...

      Sure, it runs Linux,
      But will their interop sys
      be open source? Please?

      Not much better, but technically more accurate...
    • your haiku is not
      must follow format you see
      first five, seven, five.
      • Twice five syllables
        Plus seven can't say much, but
        That's haiku for you.

        I think Douglas Hofstadter(sp? the guy who wrote 'Godel, Escher, Bach') wrote that one. It's my favorite haiku ever.
  • Wireless etherent?

    Hello IP Spoofing...

  • Hmmm.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by mtnharo ( 523610 )
    Funded by DARPA = Eventual military use for this...

    So what exactly is this for, remotely wardriving in Afganistan?
    • "So what exactly is this for, remotely wardriving in Afganistan?" There is certaibly a military requirement to have a look at areas that may have been subjected to NBC (Nuclear,Bilogical,Chemical) contamination without putting personnell at risk. A large RC vehicle was (still is?) used to measure radiation levels inside the remains of the facility at Chernobyl. Similar technology is also in use today by bomb squads.

    • Re:Hmmm.... (Score:2, Informative)

      by gte910h ( 239582 )
      Funded by DARPA = Eventual military use for this...

      So what exactly is this for, remotely wardriving in Afganistan?

      There is a program at known as Future Combat Systems. One of their big things right now is teleoperation technologies. They are looking at a whole school of Unmanned X Vehichles, where X is both arial and ground vehicles. At my work [gatech.edu], we've been collaborating with the Mobile Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech [gatech.edu], turning a Hummer [gatech.edu] and some robots known as ATRVs [irobot.com] into teleoperated bots. We have been doing this as part of the communications portion of the Future Combat Systems project, to demonstrate an IP based communications network developed by another company. Last week we drove the ATRV from New Jersey while the robot was in Atlanta. The hummer can now be driven over telnet, and probably can be driven over a similar distance (although safty concerns make testing such things a little more difficult, and caused us not to try). We can drive any of the robots by gaming joystick from a computer on the internet, with video latency being the limiting factor. And yes, all ye Linux zelots, all the computers in the project run Linux, except an old PC-104 stack running Dos from a floppy.

      One think that I have picked up is that just because DARPA is currently looking at things, it does NOT mean that they are making any of them. DARPA will from time to time fund things like this just to find out what the "Best Effort" of industry is, that way they know exactly what they CAN have made.


      To get my email address, add "@mail.gatech.edu" to my slashdot ID.
    • I've read the various replies to your comment, and I want to say that often projects are 20-30 years long, and things like this are done simply to get a feel for technology, and get the researchers some experiance.

  • Hmm... people get PAID to do that kind of work? Quick! where do I send my resume?? I have lots of ideas to spend^H^H^H^H^H research on.
  • Id be interested to know what OD they are using. I work with PC/104 stack for embedded use, and we run QNX. Since they use a "high level" language I wonder what the base platform is? Is Timber just a wrapper?
  • If it is called the timbot, is it written in Python?
  • Does this have anything to to with timbits [timhortons.com]? Mini-Robo-Trucks, Mini-Donut-Parts?
  • TIIIMBOTTTT! Livin' a lie, livin' a lie, TIMMMBOTT!!!
  • I think those Oregonic Sci-gnomes are taking the term 'War Driving' a little to literally.

    However, I wonder if their research would extend to such ventures, even if those activities are comparatively inconsequential to smaller sized rc vehicles.

  • The ICFP Programming Contest results just came out...and what happens? Same server gets slashdotted to hell...

    check it out if you can:
    http://icfpcontest.cse.ogi.edu/scoring/

  • Hey! That's my server. (Score:5, Funny)

    by azimir ( 316998 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2002 @06:26PM (#4420206) Homepage
    Gack.

    Thanks guys. That's our server you've slashdotted.
    Took us a 15 minutes to figure out why to load was hovering over 5 with 150 httpds running. Since it also handles our imap stuff..... no email for us!

    I just happened to visit slashdot in frustration (don't we all?) and noticed the Timbot stuff on the front page. Mystery solved.

    Maybe I'll got across the hall and tell the Timbot guy why his email is not working right now, or I'll just sit here and wait it out.

    The server has 12 85MHz procs & 1.5 Gigs of ram. It is a big, literally the size of a fridge, older Sun server.

    I just wish I had a picture of the thing to link to. Big monster, huge slashdotting. Slashdot wins again.

    *sigh*

    --Azimir

    • Re:Hey! That's my server. (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Labeling that post as funny is just salt in the wound.

      Aren't we all a bunch of mother fucking shit-heads?

      Why yes we are.
    • You have an S2000? Haven't seen one of those antiques in years. :) It probably has about the same horsepower as a nice new dual-pentium box - sic transit gloria moorea. Or something.

  • Looks similar (Score:2, Insightful)

    by willpost ( 449227 )
    Reminds me of the projects people bring to the Homebrew Robotics Club

    http://www.hbrobotics.org/ [hbrobotics.org]

  • Timbot detects Bugs (Score:3, Funny)

    by Ilan Volow ( 539597 ) on Wednesday October 09, 2002 @06:43PM (#4420293) Homepage
    For some unknown reason Timbot gives strange warnings about rabbits.

  • ...exists [python.org] to channel Guido.
  • http://travis.servebeer.com/volvo [servebeer.com]

    (remote control not included)
  • No hippies could stop a beowulf cluster of these!
  • *BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!*

    Some call me... Tim!!

    -jokerghost

  • Oregon SUCKS!! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Oregon Colleges don't prepare students for the real world, they are almost completely worthless in terms of practical education. This state is so bad that it has the HIGHEST unemployment rate in the country, and it rains all the time. The chicks look like dogs, and are fat as cows. If only I could afford to leave this dump...
  • TRANSFORM!

  • Mount a Pringle's can on top of it and imagine the possibilities!

    Imagine a beow... oh never mind..

  • New Slashdot category (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Earlybird ( 56426 ) <slashdot @ p u r e f i c t ion.net> on Thursday October 10, 2002 @07:47AM (#4422769) Homepage
    Could we invent a new Slashdot category, please? Call it Toys for Boys.

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