Phototropic Solar-powered Robots 51
timbong writes "Have you ever wanted a small, cheap robot that you could build for about $20? (depending on whether you buy new/scrap parts and what motors you use) Then check out this tutorial it requires some soldering experience but it really isn't very hard. If you want a kit check out solarbotics, they have some interesting stuff like walking analog adaptive robots."
Beam (Score:1)
There is definately some funky stuff going on with BEAM robotics at the moment, I have four of the critters running around on my desk at home at the moment. Great Fun.
Re:Modelling (Score:1)
My guess is that the complexity perceived in the behaviour is an emergent phenomenon ie. it's built of simple rules and situations, in essence. As far as I know nobody's really got around to designing a good way of telling the difference between 'This is complex behaviour' and 'this is behaviour that I choose to see as complex [because I think in a complex way]'.
American nuts (Score:1)
Re:Small nitpick: isn't it "phototrophic"? (Score:1)
Does "misantrophic" mean man-eating then? Well, we know what those greasy greeks were all about back then... free boy-love and all that.
Re:Robo sapiens has an interview with Tilden (Score:1)
Re:Practical Solarbotics Experience (Score:1)
Was that Solarbotics "fault"? No. The disappointment over the kit contents in particular was probably a misunderstanding on my part of what I was ordering.
Was it something that a naive beginner might want to keep in mind before charging in headfirst? Yes, absolutely.
Re:Practical Solarbotics Experience (Score:1)
Re:Practical Solarbotics Experience (Score:1)
My obvious question is... (Score:1)
[ http://maur.litestep.com/ ][ maur@technologist.com ]
Re:Practical Solarbotics Experience (Score:1)
One thing to remember is that electrical components vary, and you could've just gotten a voltage regulator that triggers a little higher than normal. Also, the circuits have been refined over the last few years... you would probably have better luck now.
I've personally never built a robot from a kit at solarbotics, but I have built quite a few BEAM robots from scratch. Normally, you need to have enough electronics background to troubleshoot a circuit, and maybe enough to work around a particular component.
You could try the BEAM list for starters... any of us would be glad to help.
-phillip
Re:Dragonfly -- Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy (Score:1)
Later
ErikZ
Re:Wow, this brings up memories... (Score:1)
Or are you a 13 year old pipsqueak?
What? (Score:1)
Abusing robots are we?
By the time these kinds of smart & small robots become a reality, they'll have rights of their own.
After human rights, animal rights and rights for fish(*) the robot-rights will become a reality. Not because robots can claim these rights for themselves, but because humans identify so much with the robots. After all, if it looks like a dog, acts like a dog and sounds like a dog, people are going to think it IS a dog.
Time to read Asimovs robot stories again.
Cheers,
Matt
(*) Recently, a court in Belgium ruled it illegal to eat live fish after a complaint by animal rights organisation GAIA. The consumption of the live fish was a tradition that lasted a few hundred years...
Re:It's not a robot (Score:1)
it is merely a feedback controlled motor system.
Absolutely. But I think it's no less a robot for that.
What is a robot ? Are there any existing devices that you'd class as a robot ? I think this is an interesting question, because there are very, very few current machines that meet your criteria.
No, a machine has to be able to make decisions in order to qualify as a robot.
What's a "decision" ? Does a robot that "makes a choice" that will improve its access to food/fuel/power count as a decision maker ? Must it have an internal world model that knows, "I want food, Food is over there, I will go over there" ? Or is it sufficient to simply turn towards the light ? It may not have an understanding of "food", "light" and their relationship, merely that generations of its parent [algorithms] underwent a proces of natural selection that rewarded those who favoured light by improving their food access.
Are you familiar with subsumption [umich.edu] architectures ? These are a highly successful series of robot designs, based on tiny robot-components executing according to their inbuilt rules, but producing a resultant behaviour of the system (or "creature") that is apparently far more complex. Nowhere in these architectures is there any notion of a Big Architecture "World View" or any "Reasoning"
One of the dogmatic statements of the subsumptionists (on Brooks' model) is that, "The world is its own best model". This means that robots shouldn't try to model the world, they should use it itself as the model. For a photovore, the best food sources are found in the places that are brightest (this is a world modelling task, as it's not trivially obvious to a robot). A Big Architecture robot would need to "know" that light==food, and that it should then seek out food by seeking out light. A photovore doesn't do this; it just goes to the brightest places, with all the intelligence of a thermostat. It doesn't even realise it's seeking "food" by this process, it only knows that it's seeking light. It doesn't even know why it seeks light (as it doesn't know that light is food), it just does it. More complex ones may have built this behaviour up randomly, by either a reward or selection process; perhaps the sound and humidity seekers starved earlier.
Greek games (Score:1)
Not long now... (Score:1)
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Re:So? and Re: Re: So? (Score:1)
http://www.robotstore.com [robotstore.com] has a few.
the photovore robot featured in the article was originally a BEAM kit I think, they're still around but I forget the URL.
as for l33t j03's comment about downloadable source code; this robot doesnt run any code, theres no microprocessor, its just a neat little logic circuit that runs something like:
if light is on my right - then spin left motor
if light is on my left - then spin right motor
if light is in front of me - then spin both
a very neat way of making a little light hunting robot
Klowner
succesful relationships and solarfly project (Score:1)
I'm intrigued - can you repeat his thinking/reasoning for this? (I could guess at a few possible reasons, but now I'm curious
Very small, could transmit audio and video AND haptic feedback. Could fly anywhere, and I beleive it was solar powered
There is something like this in (early) development at Berkely. It seems a fairly ambitious project to me and I don't really expect it to reach useful completion, but even so, that their feasibility studies suggested it was possible is quite interesting. Info on it here:
http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ronf/mfi.htm
For some other fascinating biorobotics links, check out:
http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/~moeller/biorobotics.ht
Re:robot wars (Score:1)
Nope, different origin (Score:1)
robot wars (Score:1)
Re:My obvious question is... (Score:1)
Well, it was the U.K. about 15 years ago there used to be a show called the great egg race http://www.qwertyuiop.co.uk/gs/atoz/programmes/g/
Come here my robot army of the night! (Score:1)
Probably nastier too, but hey, if you can make them yourself, you could make all sorts of crazy things.
What I want though, is a small robot that can just travel up and down my driveway holding up a "Beware of Dog" sign. just my 2 cents.
The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
If people are really interested in this stuff... (Score:1)
Goto http://www.robohoo.com/ for a Yahoo like directory of resources available.
Re:futures steps (Score:1)
Re:Out on the Lawn? (Score:1)
http://www.robotics.com/robomenu/yardbot2.html
Re:Human fuel (Score:1)
http://www.peoplesgas.com/etrc/ETGastrobot.html
Asimov's Three Laws (Score:1)
futures steps (Score:1)
Just rememeber the matrix.. (Score:1)
Imagine the Possibilities (Score:1)
Pets tend to be waste-producing and ill-behaved, a little robot programmed to perform simple tricks seems vastly superior. Also, owners would never have trouble with their robots fighting each other - or if they did, they could turn them off.
While some people truly do see the need to bring a miniature version of them self into the world, I suspect that many child-bearers are simply bored with the house being so quiet. These people would be perfectly served by a rambunctious little robot programmed to perform simple acts of mischief. One wouldn't have to worry about all the property damage and liability inherent to real children, and these robots would never complain about going to bed.
Do you want to beat your robot? Go right ahead - nobody's business if you do. Also, robots, like children, can be turned off. However, the legal implications of turning a robot off are much smaller.
Finally, the largest edge that robots have over both pets and children is the lack of crap. Anyone who has had either will know that both pets and children produce far too much crap. Robots, though, could be programmed to produce none at all.
- qpt
do-it-yourself (Score:1)
Re:Just rememeber the matrix.. (Score:1)
Practical Solarbotics Experience (Score:2)
Worse, it claimed to be able to charge up and then go; the idea being that you set it in a brighly lit room, and the motor would go every so often (and if it were incorporated into a robot, it would move). Unfortunately, I never seemed to be able to get it to charge off of anything less bright than a 300W Halogen bulb! For whatever reason (and I don't recall enough electronics from school to debug it) it did not seem to *ever* go in a lit room, even sun lit.
This is not to say that Solarbotics are bad or you shouldn't be interested, etc. But if you're a complete duffer when it comes to electronics, you might be better off with a Mindstorms kit.
Wow, this is amazing (Score:2)
But seriously folks, it always struck me that roboticists have made phototropic robots because it was easy to do, and it made the robots seem as if they were intelligent - not because because there was any sort of practicality in the end result.
-josh
Re:It's not a robot (Score:2)
A robot is a machine that can adapt its behavior to achieve its goals.
That's an interesting distinction to make, and clearly a valuable one in some cases, but it's certainly not a fundamental definition of a robot. Even Kapek's original robotniks didn't have that much freedom of behaviour. Few robots even have the concept of goal-oriented behaviour, let alone choosing behaviours to achieve it. Much of the interesting current work in robotics is focussed on robots built as nodes with minimal inherent behaviours and the behaviour of the system as a whole arises as their combination, not by designing from a top-down concept.
Robo sapiens has an interview with Tilden (Score:2)
Check out:
Robo sapiens: Evolution of a New Species (Amazon Link) [amazon.com]
Oops, they're both at the same time (Score:2)
Out on the Lawn? (Score:2)
Depending on the size and the extra features (speakers, cattleprods, whatever), just the thing to scare the heck out of the neighborhood dogs.
Re:Imagine the Possibilities (Score:2)
Anyone remember the "we'll block them at the isp, we'll block them at the servers, we'll block them in their own computers" speech?
Dragonfly -- Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy (Score:2)
A couple of years back a friend almost had me beleiving that audio surveillance was the key to succesful relationship with women... if I'd had the budget and knowhow to get the proper gear, I might have tried it.
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Re:succesful relationships and solarfly project (Score:2)
The idea: you need to be able to observe the state of her take on the relationship without changing it. The only way to do that is to get a close informant or bug them.
This way, you can know where you stand. If she's wavering, you push a little more and differently, and then back off (applying the "advance-and-retreat" principle). If she's really interested, you know, and can do whatever you'd do in that case. If she's not interested at all, you stop wasting time, because lots of women won't tell you.
It's sortof "The Rules"-esque gone techno-geek/intelligence/surveillance/psycho.
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I actually built one of these (Score:2)
The speeder doesn't do much of anything, when left on the floor, if the sun hits it it will zoom off after the capacitor charges. However, it was a lot of fun to build... I had never soldered before (though I had seen it done hundreds of times at work).
In building the robot (if you can call it that), I learned alot about BEAM robotics. It makes a lot of sense that higher order intelligence can come from a large number of simple entities. Take a look at an ant colony or a bee hive sometime.
I imagine that someday, nanobots, because of their size will use the simple, self-organizing principles of BEAM robotics to create the intelligence desired.
All I want to know is... (Score:2)
Wow, this brings up memories... (Score:3)
When I was in High School and early college, (20+ years ago) Radio Shack had these project books using transistors and early IC's (remember the ubiquitous 555 timer, and the IC op-amp?).
About that time, I sent away for a book I found in a catalog entitled something like 'How to Build a Robotic Pet' It was a thick book and covered everything from motive power to sensory circuits. The brain was based around a 6800 (no, I didn't leave off a 0) and was programmed in straight hex.
I never actually built this robot, but it taught me quite a bit, just thinking about building it and making improvements on it with more modern technology.
Radio Shack sells very few of the component level stuff any more, things that filled my High School day dreams: resistors, capacitors, diodes, triacs, breadboards and basic IC components like 555 timers, op-amps and flip flops. Is this component level understanding of electronics going away? I made some nifty little things, such as a burglar alarm using a triac, some resistors and a photocell, hooked up to a chirper circuit made from a 555 timer and an IC amplifier.
Mark Tilden - Los Alamos/University of Waterloo (Score:3)
Poor man's robitics (Score:3)
These BEAM robots - among them the featured one - are in most cases nonprogrammable, hardwired machines like photovores. While small, simple robots have a certain fascination, quite a number of them are extremely "dumb" (because hardwired). It can be quite a lot of fun to work with these, though.
Re:Mindstorms (Score:3)
http://www.pitsco.com [pitsco.com].
Get the Pitsco Catalog. It has tons of Lego stuff, as well as do-it-yourself supplies.
You can make proximity detectors with the flex sensors sold by Pitsco. They're the same sensors as in the Nintendo Glove Controllers. For more info on homebrew Lego stuff go to Mike Gasperi's Homebrew Sensors page:
http://www.plazaearth.com/usr/gasperi/lego.htm [plazaearth.com].
Small nitpick: isn't it "phototrophic"? (Score:3)
Modelling (Score:3)
insects (Score:3)