Open Design for ~$800 Swarm Robots

An anonymous reader writes "There are lots of multi-robot designs out there. Most are either research platforms well over $2K (often $10K or more), or are hobbyist bots under $400 with tiny brains and few sensors. But George Mason University's new FlockBots wiki is interesting. They're trying to pack as much functionality as possible into a roughly $800, 7" mobile swarmbot, and publish the design and software as a free and open spec. So far their design includes a wireless 200MHz Gumstix Linux computer, a camera, range and bump sensors, wheel encoders, a can gripper, and lots more. It's a great-looking design and I think the cost could drop to $500 with vendors doing consolidation."

Military applications?

[CyricZ]

I wonder if we'll see freedom fighters in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan start to use robots like these such as weapons (assuming these researchers do succeed in keeping the cost low). Indeed, considering the US military's increased use of drones and unmanned combat vehicles, it is doubtful that those they are fighting against will not soon resort to employing he same methodologies.

This particular device uses Linux, which brings up another question: should developers of open source software license their software so as to prevent it from being used in such killing devices? Or should freedom trump such an argument?

only you

[jeffehobbs]

Cheap swarm robots? Hopefully they can find the room to post this [boingboing.net] somewhere in their workspace.

~jeff

You can shave a lot off that $800

[Rxke]

if you're willing to do some soldering.

A look at the list reveals some of the off-the-shelf stuff is very pricey (like the battery charger, boy oh boy, what a rip-off.)

I guess we'll see people come up with homebrew solutions to expensive off-the-shelf parts, and bring the price down to, say $400, easily.
Might be an interesting project to follow.

Some other similar implementations...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can be found here [gumstix.org].

Idea for a complementary bot

[goodEvans]

What you need is another, similar bot with a flat top and a forklift-type arrangement on front. Then you can get a lifter bot and a normal bot working in cooperation to get stuff onto a table etc.

Now imagine a tower of these things...

ps. I think I've just worked out where this idea came from. Remember the episode of Futurama, where Fry, Leela and Bender are trying to escape from the robot planet, and the robots chasing them start stacking themselves on top of one another, before crashing to the ground because the bottom one slipped on the shipment of lugnuts?

Sea Swarm

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm working on an underwater version. Bigest obstacle is communications. Blue-green LED (as opposed to infrared for use above water) gets good bandwidth but fallback to modulated 50kHz when link fails is a royal PITA. Power requirements aren't too bad as B&W camera with blue-green light source sees pretty well under water. Failsafe for dead main battery is valvewhich opens when power is lost allowing bladder to inflate and fish to float, belly up, like a dead fish. Beacon on belly mounted antenna runs on it's own battery which is connected when valve opens. Basic RDF to locate the dead fish.

Not ready yet so no pix. Perhaps another 18 months ...

Commercial Kits Better and Cheaper

[Anonymous Coward]

Outfits like roboticsconnection.com sell pre-cut kits (eg "Botster") that run standard microprocessors. These kits are much better made, and well under $800 already! Depending on the processor, you can get 'em for under $200.

Re:Interesting equipment choice

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with sonar is that it eats batteries like there's no tomorrow. That's fine if you're runnng off of lead acid or li-poly like the bigger bots, but these guys are trying to run the bot for 4 hours off of a pack of 5 A's. Sonar's not feasible for this, but the excellent SHARP IR rangers they're using *are* feasible for it.