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In my school we make line following robots with 14 year olds that are programmed using a couple of cheap micro controllers and cost about £4 in total. $1000 see

In my school we make line following robots with 14 year olds that are programmed using a couple of cheap micro controllers and cost about £4 in total. $1000 seems a little excessive.

gfodor 13y ago
i am referring to a 'legit' robot platform that has sufficient sensors, wheel tick counting, etc, to implement full-on SLAM to get around an area of your house or something (built up from raw sensor and control I/O), which I'm assuming is kind of the "write a decent ray tracer" or "write a lisp" of the robotics world. turtlebot is like $2k, for example: http://store.clearpathrobotics.com/ http://store.clearpathrobotics.com/
- AnIrishDuck 13y ago
  The time is coming. Remember when computers were very expensive and out of reach for the average joe? It seems likely robotics will follow the same trajectory. The next generation will probably be playing around with $50-100 robotic toys analogous to today's Raspberry Pi.
  - jmpe 13y ago
    It's coming but robotics has a major obstacle: transferring power to locomotion. Ideally, we'd have something like a synthetic muscle that converts electricity to work. Instead we have all sorts of servo/hydraulics based actuators. Because of this robotics have a problem with elegant design (anything that doesn't run on wheels) and power/autonomy. There are advances out there, but as long as one can't buy a strand of synthetic muscle for a few dollars it's not going to progress that much.
    - moocowduckquack 13y ago
      Tendons on linear motors seems like a good approach. http://www.roboy.org/ http://www.roboy.org/ Also, there are shape memory alloys and they are essentially a strand of synthetic muscle for a few dollars. You could concievable bundle them together to make a larger muscle, but you will probably have to do some active cooling if you want any sort of decent response curve and even then motors can be a lot faster. What I think we could really do with is a linear actuator with a simple built in clutch that doesn't take power to hold a position.
      - jmpe 13y ago
        Thanks, wasn't aware of roboy. You're absolutely correct re clutching actuators. There are a lot of robotics projects out there that combine small devices with limited mobility to create a larger (multicellular) robot with higher mobility. All of these projects stumble on that particular aspect: maintaining a lock without consuming power. M-Tran, Symbrion, Distributed Flight Array, ...
- dangrossman 13y ago
  You might look at the Neato robotic vacuums. Unlike Roomba's random wandering, the Neato bots have 360-degree LIDAR on top and a wall-finder on the side to do SLAM. They also have a USB port on the side that supposedly provides raw data from the sensors as well as direct motor control. They get a good 1-1.5 hours of run-time per charge with the vacuum turned on, probably longer with it turned off. All that robot for under $200 if you watch for sales.
  - eichin 13y ago
    Indeed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eichin/7123623579/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/eichin/7123623579/ is generated from that scanner (on a clean floor, you do surprisingly well with just assuming the bot moved where you commanded it, as far as doing naive mapping with one.) At the time I got a little bogged down in running it tethered, today I'd just slap a raspi and a USB battery pack on top...
- tlarkworthy 13y ago
  yeah proper robots is absurdly expensive. But its also multi-faceted. So if your interest is in machine vision, you can do alot of experiments with a web cam (which are really good now!) I built an optical feedback robot arm for under $100 [1]. At work I use a robot where an individual sensor costs $100,000 The algorithms are much the same though. Doing control on cheap hardware is more challenging, so if you can do something on cheap hardware, you really have done something noteworthy! Expensive hardware pays for reduction of noise, it treats the symptoms of reality but does not solve them. To truly solve the robotics issue of environmental noise, you have to solve it in software which is really hard but can be investigated cheap on cheap hardware. Robot projects fail because of software, not hardware normally. You should always build the software stack before spending lots of money on hardware. [1] http://edinburghhacklab.com/2013/05/robotics-adaptive-control-and-vision/ http://edinburghhacklab.com/2013/05/robotics-adaptive-contro... Here are some cheap ideas: 1. Improve the robot arm control I outlined above. There is a huge market for cheap robot arms you could scale the ideas prototyped in [1] upto. 2. Active face recognition, put a camera with a zoom on a pan and tilt. Try to zoom into peoples faces for better recognition. Animals exploit shitty eye hardware with active attention in a way our current robots don't exploit. 3. voice activated inventory system for electronic components. Every hackerspace can't find the components they own. Popout a component tray via a push gantry behind it. 4. 3D hardware localization system. Actually determining the position of something is hard. Its the building block for gather training sets to do more challenging problems

In my school we make line following robots with 14 year olds that are programmed using a couple of cheap micro controllers and cost about £4 in total. $1000 seems a little excessive.

gfodor 13y ago

i am referring to a 'legit' robot platform that has sufficient sensors, wheel tick counting, etc, to implement full-on SLAM to get around an area of your house or something (built up from raw sensor and control I/O), which I'm assuming is kind of the "write a decent ray tracer" or "write a lisp" of the robotics world. turtlebot is like $2k, for example: http://store.clearpathrobotics.com/ http://store.clearpathrobotics.com/

AnIrishDuck 13y ago
The time is coming. Remember when computers were very expensive and out of reach for the average joe? It seems likely robotics will follow the same trajectory. The next generation will probably be playing around with $50-100 robotic toys analogous to today's Raspberry Pi.
- jmpe 13y ago
  It's coming but robotics has a major obstacle: transferring power to locomotion. Ideally, we'd have something like a synthetic muscle that converts electricity to work. Instead we have all sorts of servo/hydraulics based actuators. Because of this robotics have a problem with elegant design (anything that doesn't run on wheels) and power/autonomy. There are advances out there, but as long as one can't buy a strand of synthetic muscle for a few dollars it's not going to progress that much.
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    Tendons on linear motors seems like a good approach. http://www.roboy.org/ http://www.roboy.org/ Also, there are shape memory alloys and they are essentially a strand of synthetic muscle for a few dollars. You could concievable bundle them together to make a larger muscle, but you will probably have to do some active cooling if you want any sort of decent response curve and even then motors can be a lot faster. What I think we could really do with is a linear actuator with a simple built in clutch that doesn't take power to hold a position.
    - jmpe 13y ago
      Thanks, wasn't aware of roboy. You're absolutely correct re clutching actuators. There are a lot of robotics projects out there that combine small devices with limited mobility to create a larger (multicellular) robot with higher mobility. All of these projects stumble on that particular aspect: maintaining a lock without consuming power. M-Tran, Symbrion, Distributed Flight Array, ...
dangrossman 13y ago
You might look at the Neato robotic vacuums. Unlike Roomba's random wandering, the Neato bots have 360-degree LIDAR on top and a wall-finder on the side to do SLAM. They also have a USB port on the side that supposedly provides raw data from the sensors as well as direct motor control. They get a good 1-1.5 hours of run-time per charge with the vacuum turned on, probably longer with it turned off. All that robot for under $200 if you watch for sales.
- eichin 13y ago
  Indeed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eichin/7123623579/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/eichin/7123623579/ is generated from that scanner (on a clean floor, you do surprisingly well with just assuming the bot moved where you commanded it, as far as doing naive mapping with one.) At the time I got a little bogged down in running it tethered, today I'd just slap a raspi and a USB battery pack on top...
tlarkworthy 13y ago
yeah proper robots is absurdly expensive. But its also multi-faceted. So if your interest is in machine vision, you can do alot of experiments with a web cam (which are really good now!) I built an optical feedback robot arm for under $100 [1]. At work I use a robot where an individual sensor costs $100,000 The algorithms are much the same though. Doing control on cheap hardware is more challenging, so if you can do something on cheap hardware, you really have done something noteworthy! Expensive hardware pays for reduction of noise, it treats the symptoms of reality but does not solve them. To truly solve the robotics issue of environmental noise, you have to solve it in software which is really hard but can be investigated cheap on cheap hardware. Robot projects fail because of software, not hardware normally. You should always build the software stack before spending lots of money on hardware. [1] http://edinburghhacklab.com/2013/05/robotics-adaptive-control-and-vision/ http://edinburghhacklab.com/2013/05/robotics-adaptive-contro... Here are some cheap ideas: 1. Improve the robot arm control I outlined above. There is a huge market for cheap robot arms you could scale the ideas prototyped in [1] upto. 2. Active face recognition, put a camera with a zoom on a pan and tilt. Try to zoom into peoples faces for better recognition. Animals exploit shitty eye hardware with active attention in a way our current robots don't exploit. 3. voice activated inventory system for electronic components. Every hackerspace can't find the components they own. Popout a component tray via a push gantry behind it. 4. 3D hardware localization system. Actually determining the position of something is hard. Its the building block for gather training sets to do more challenging problems