Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Hardware

Phototropic Solar-powered Robots 51

Posted by michael from the it's-alive dept.
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."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Phototropic Solar-powered Robots More

Phototropic Solar-powered Robots

Comments Filter:

  • Beam (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This technology has already advanced with pratical applications. There were plans for using the light seeking properties to keep nano satelites pointed at the sun therefore reduing the weight and the chances of computer failure being minimal. Mark Tilden also had some plans for sending some of his bots to the moon to prepare an area for future use.

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's hardly surprising that you can get this to happen without too much complex coding, when you consider that maggots, for example, have this sort of behaviour (in reverse) and I think you're looking at a total of about 40 neurons there.

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What? Don't tell me you Americans turn your nuts in the wrong direction in addition to using silly units like Fahrenheit!

  • Re:Small nitpick: isn't it "phototrophic"? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Really?

    Does "misantrophic" mean man-eating then? Well, we know what those greasy greeks were all about back then... free boy-love and all that.

  • He gave a great presentation over at the AI lab and has a quick wit and isn't shy to use it. It was a very fluid and interactive presentation.
  • I am confident that I absolutely am NOT confused with another company. I did not state that there was no charge circuit, I stated that for some reason MY charge circuit would not activate unless I had it within a few inches of a halogen lamp. Yes, I left it sit for long periods of time in sunny rooms. No, I did not get it to work under those circumstances. Furthermore, it was not a "complete robot kit". As I stated, it was a solar cell, a circuit board and parts, and a motor. I had to supply the rest of the parts should I want to.

    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.

  • I am confident that have this confused with another company. I ordered Solarbotics first kit in 1994, and it was a complete solar power robot with a charge circuit. It would charge from indirect light (although over much longer time). I don't know of any beginner kit they have sold without the BEAM charge circuit. There is a Yahoo (previously egroup). http://groups.yahoo.com/group/beam I should mention that ever since I built my first solar powered device I have been involved in BEAM (as time allowed). It is a excellent way to get started in electronics, mechanics and robotics. Also CPUs (computers) are not discouraged. The goal is to do research and to use the best parts for what they are best at. CPUs are better at things like path planning and basically 'human goals' for a robot. BEAM typically does better in applications that are not predictable like walking over complex enviroments and through dynamic enviroments. The same circuits can also be used for very basic stimuli-responses like following or avoiding light or a apply another sensor. Mark
  • I was not trying to pick on you, just clarify that out of the 500+ kits I have used to teach kids over the past 6+ years, I have had no problems (besides a occasional kids soldering mistake). My only point is the kits are extremely reliable and are very much complete. Also Solarbotics offers e-mail and phone support to help you debug problems. I am sorry you had problems, but the the confusion I had with your message versus what you now clarified is from the below portions. If you want to build another I would be happy to help you out.. just let me know.. (my URL is listed above). Mark Actually you claimed: "It seemed to claim to be a complete robot kit; however, when I got done with it, it was a solar cell & a motor." Then you "Worse, it claimed to be able to charge up and then go; the idea being that you set it in a brighly lit room, ....
  • When are they going to make an episode of Junk Yard Wars [discovery.com] using this concept as a base? Ideally it would culminate in something like that other geek robot game [robotwars.com] show, but there are certainly other venues that could be followed, like autonomous retrieval of items. Perhaps a bit difficult without some sort of headstart though.

    [ http://maur.litestep.com/ ][ maur@technologist.com ]
  • Well, that'll happen.

    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

  • Ye Cats! I had almost completely forgotten that series. I wonder what happened to my copy?

    Later
    ErikZ
  • Not that old... I'm (only) 27, and I well remember building 900bps modems out of 555 timers and op-amps on nice blue breadboards at uni.

    Or are you a 13 year old pipsqueak? :-)
  • Do you want to beat your robot? Go right ahead

    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...

  • 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.

  • Actually, it was the greasy English who put those aitches in. "Th" stands for the Greek letter theta, while an h-less "T" stands for the Greek letter tau.
  • That walking talking robotic love toy is just a few years away..

    ---

  • You can still buy kits for little robotic projects. There's stores all over the internet selling neat little kits.
    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
  • A couple of years back a friend almost had me beleiving that audio surveillance was the key to succesful relationship with women...

    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.html

    For some other fascinating biorobotics links, check out:
    http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/~moeller/biorobotics.htm l# www
  • Ever watch the anime series Armitage III. This almost seems like a step towards Phobians(or Forths)
  • "Misanthropic" is derived from the Greek word "anthropos" meaning "man". Notice the very subtle games those greasy Greeks played with the position of the letter "h" in their words.
  • solar powered is all very well but its of little use however, unless it has a hardened steel pickaxe blade or a 500rpm circular saw.
  • A long time ago in a far off place...

    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/g reat_egg_race/, one of the hosts "Prof. Heinz Wolff" what a name. They did exactly what you suggest.

  • How cool is this! $20 robots! I dont know about you, though, but straight off this made me think of those programmable Lego toys, but cheaper.
    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.
  • There's a lot of resources out there that have many tutorials and schematics to build robots. Some are just phototropic in the sence that they always "go to the light", some run away from light, some run around like an insect avoiding things with IR detection, sonar and the like. If you have a relatively steady hand for soldering and can read a schematic, you can find plans to buid robots ranging from the basic phototropic to autonomus robots that have voice recognition. It all depends on your expertize, experience and how much cash you're willing to spend.

    Goto http://www.robohoo.com/ for a Yahoo like directory of resources available.
  • Try going to http://www.robohoo.com for a Yahoo like directory of robots and projects...
  • They already are out on the lawns! Check this out...

    http://www.robotics.com/robomenu/yardbot2.html
  • Already half way there...

    http://www.peoplesgas.com/etrc/ETGastrobot.html
  • If you're going to program a robot to obey the three laws, concider reversing #2 and #3, to give higher priority to self-prservation. I always thought Asimov treated robots as an expendable commodity item, not the expensive, irreplacable items they should be.
  • I think it would be beneficial to robotics to combine BEAM technologies such as this with more conventional AI genereated at a fixed computer. It seems to me that one of the biggest problems with robotics is that the size needed for power supplies, computers, etc., makes robots too big and cumbersome to be moblie. There are few mobile, intelligent robots. Perhaps if we combine these two technologies, things will be different. We can have a vacuum robot whose thinking is done at my PC. The PC has a map of my house and gets the data from the robot's sensors. It tells the robot what to do--say, "go into that room and vacuum with attachment number 2". The robot makes sure it's not too low on power, and goes to recharge if it is. The robot makes split second decisions on it's surroundings... "That's a dog... I should avoid it." Does anyone know of any projects like this?
  • What we do know is that we blackened the sky. At the time the machines were dependant on solar power.....
  • As robots such as these become cheaper and more functional, hopefully people will begin to view them as valid alternatives to pets and children.

    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
  • First X-ray machines, now robots. Slashdot is fulfilling all the build-this-advanced-thing-yourself needs I've always had. :)
  • Yeah, all we need now is for someone to create phototropic robots that can reproduce and *learn* then we're all screwed. Come to think of it 1999 was a good year and the economy has been getting worse lately... Oh, sh#t, this is the beginning of the end...
  • I bought one of the original Solarbotics kits many ages ago. It seemed to claim to be a complete robot kit; however, when I got done with it, it was a solar cell & a motor. That's not entirely terrible, but it was certainly disappointing.

    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.

  • Now I will not have to find light on my own. The advancements of modern science truly amaze me.

    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

  • 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.

  • Tilden's is one of the best interviews in the book Robo sapiens. He's hilarious! The book is a series of one and two page interviews with a large (~50) number of researchers in different areas of robotics. The book is aimed at laypeople, so don't be disappointed if it's not techie enough for you. It's worth it for the awesome photographs. It gets four out of five stars at Amazon (9 reviews).

    Check out:

    Robo sapiens: Evolution of a New Species (Amazon Link) [amazon.com]


  • Turns out that these robots are both phototrophic, or photovores as the website calls them, and phototropic, just like plants. Given the potential for confusion between phototrophic and phototropic, using photovore is probably a very good idea.
  • I don't know, I just have this mental picture of a geek in the suburbs with these things out on the lawn.

    Depending on the size and the extra features (speakers, cattleprods, whatever), just the thing to scare the heck out of the neighborhood dogs.

  • except that sony are whores of the highest order - so 'F' the AIBO and their bi-ped.
    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?

  • What _I_ want is the "Dragonfly" from Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy. Very small, could transmit audio and video AND haptic feedback. Could fly anywhere, and I beleive it was solar powered (phototrophic?). The proverbial "fly on the wall".

    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. :)

    --
  • I'm intrigued - can you repeat his thinking/reasoning for this? (I could guess at a few possible reasons, but now I'm curious :-)

    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.



    --
  • My wife gave me the Solarbotics Solarspeeder for Christmas. I wanted an AIBO, but, finances being what they are, the ~$20 solar speeder was just fine, plus I had the fun of putting it together.

    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.
  • Can I get one of these robots to go in to work for me? Man, its too early for this geek to be up on a Monday.

  • Wow, this brings up memories... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 26, 2001 @03:51AM (#403101)

    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)

    by coreman ( 8656 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @03:20AM (#403102) Homepage
    Mark has been doing this for quite a while. He was showing them off on a college tour in 1994 when we saw him at MIT. If your cable system carries it, there's been a special running on Discovery Science that includes this stuff that's worth the watch

  • Poor man's robitics (Score:3)

    by yabHuj ( 10782 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @03:18AM (#403103) Homepage
    Most of the robots in question are around the BEAM philosophy (see http://www.nis.lanl.gov/projects/robot/ [lanl.gov] or http://people.ne.mediaone.net/bushbo/beam/main.htm l [mediaone.net]). This is not bad philosophy, providing excellent insight in problem solving, but limited to specific tasks. In most cases, there is no microcontroller involved at all.

    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)

    by mtDNA ( 123855 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @07:20AM (#403104) Homepage
    Pitsco sells solar panels that can power the Mindstorms Motors. Unfortunately, they can't power the RCX + motors. Check out:


    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)

    by Elbelow ( 176227 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @03:33AM (#403105) Homepage
    The title should probably use "Phototrophic" (literally "light-eating", deriving its energy from light; from the Greek "photos" for light and "trophein" for "to eat") instead of "phototropic" (meaning "seeking the light"). Plants are phototrophic when they use photosynthesis to make food, and they are phototropic when they grow to turn their leaves in the direction of the sun.

  • Modelling (Score:3)

    by whanau ( 315267 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @03:16AM (#403106)
    Many robot researchers have done research with these phototropic robots, emulating ecosystems to see how these robots behave. These phototropic robots are the "herbivores" with predators that "feed" off them by seeking them out and placing them in a pen where they are rewarded with energy. The interesting thing is that all of this happens without powerful microproccessors and thousands of lines of control code.

  • insects (Score:3)

    by penguinux ( 320098 ) on Monday February 26, 2001 @09:11AM (#403107)
    I follow (more or less) Mark Tilden's work for about 6 years already. What you probably do not realize is that he pretty much solved the problem of modeling insects (insects are automata unlike mammals). In this respect all these LEGO robots (or any other CPU/code based robots) do not even remotely approach the the ingeniously (means - simply) designed creaters. I recommend everybody to pay attention to this invention, this is the only known to me example of getting inside the complex system of brain with not yet recognized consequences for the neurotechnology.

Slashdot Top Deals

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." - Bert Lantz

Close