Inside Mantis: a 2-Ton Hexapod Robot With a Linux Brain 84
DeviceGuru writes "After four years of development, Micromagic Systems has finally completed the Mantis Hexapod Walking Machine (YouTube video), claimed to be the world's largest all-terrain operational hexapod robot. The device stands nearly three meters tall, weighs just under two tons, and is controlled by a PC/104 module stack running embedded Linux."
Dubstep Warning (Score:5, Informative)
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I think a soundtrack of the dubwalk and dubrun are in order as well. Now lets see that hexapod doing some dubsteps!
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Horrible video (Score:5, Informative)
The video couldn't have been worse, considering how interesting the subject is.
The videographer should be shot on general principle.
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Re:Horrible video (Score:5, Funny)
I think it is intentional. To hide the fact that it's a slow plodding disappointment.
So far the video has shown:
-Walking at a snails pace.
-Feebly kicking over an oil drum.
-A huge cloud of smoke at the end which is either a pyrotechnic effect to hide the machine or a side effect of that diesel engine blowing up.
But hey it runs Linux, or so they say.
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It doesn't run Linux, that was a miscommunication. It's somewhat successfully trying to run away from Linus.
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I want to see it operating on sand dunes.
Re:Horrible video (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a less "flashy" one, a few months older:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=3sCuse5TZGA [youtube.com]
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The videographer should be shot on general principle.
A full 20% of the video consists of closing credits!
Clunky gaits (Score:2)
Painfully true. All the jerkyness in the video seems to be to conceal what a klutz the thing is. It's comparable to the OSU Hexapod [youtube.com] from 1984. The OSU thing was supposed to have "off-road" capability, but it never did more than climb a slightly sloped dirt road. DoD cut off their funding after that.
As with the machine from 30 years ago, there seems to be an option to plant five legs and take manual control of the sixth. That's how they kicked the barrel. With this capability, the operator can (eventua
Robot? (Score:4, Informative)
So er it has a driver... That makes it not a robot!
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It can be controlled remotely via wifi. The in-seat driver is optional.
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What would you class as a robot?? Would you say Asimo is a robot, or big dog? because both of those still have drivers behind the scenes. Only when big dog is in follow the leader mode does it not need the driver! In fact, a washing machine is probably closer to a true robot than all of these, but who wants to sit in a washing machine and drive it around!! So much negativity!
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The term "robot" has been around for quite awhile, and due to its broad use, it doesn't have a very clear definition.
About all the agreement you're going to get on it is that a robot is a mechanical device capable of performing automated actions. It generally doesn't have to emulate physical (walking) or cognitive (AI) biological features. My dish washer is technically a robot. It's not very glamorous, but there you have it.
Robots exist in all degrees of "autonomy". It
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Robot is one of those terms like "artificial intelligence" that keeps getting diluted by overreaching marketing use. The cumulative effect is to drag down the term rather than inflate the product.
"Robot" has devolved from meaning a conscious, completely autonomous, usually humanoid, self-contained machine capable of making its own decisions (thus the need for Three Laws of Robotics) to meaning any servomechanism under human control aided by a PID Loop or Kalman Filter to relieve the operator from the most
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I can start my car and access my house via wifi, and control many aspects of it with a phone, is that a robot, acc to your theory its the fucking terminator
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I'm not saying it's fully autonomous. But it seems it can do some stuff autonomously. Then again, all I see is some hexapod walking around and kicking a barrel.
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You don't get it, the driver is the robot that runs on penguins.
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Its not autonomous but its a robot. There's a difference.
6 legs bad, 8 legs good! (Score:1)
OMFG (Score:1)
it went almost 10 feet in 2 min and 100 jump cuts
it put its foot on a pile of stuff then jump cut to it walking on smooth tarmac
it kicked a barrel while standing completely still
meanwhile a stupid mid 80's army hummer can travel at highway speeds. can scale a 3 foot wall, and who gives a shit about a barrel, an empty cylinder is not a problem when you have wheels that dont span 15 feet wide
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Yes, but your mid 80's army hummer doesn't run Linux, and has unformfortable teeth...
Re:OMFG (Score:5, Funny)
It means it cannot be formforted.
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Running Linux as the OS is no big deal. It is just an OS they could use Windows or DOS if they wanted to. It is the custom software written is more important then the OS. Granted Unix based OSs makes it easier to communicate with hardware, but so what. It isn't like the mid 90s where Linux was new. Linux is widely used. I just never made it in the desktop.
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it went almost 10 feet in 2 min and 100 jump cuts
it put its foot on a pile of stuff then jump cut to it walking on smooth tarmac
it kicked a barrel while standing completely still
meanwhile a stupid mid 80's army hummer can travel at highway speeds. can scale a 3 foot wall, and who gives a shit about a barrel, an empty cylinder is not a problem when you have wheels that dont span 15 feet wide
Really! Why call it "all terrain" when its really "paved flat surface" . When I read all terrain I was expecting it at least being designed to be able to lift its feet more than 2 feet and for it to be able to place them at an arbitrary height. I think it was twenty years since I saw a thing just like this one... and it required no "software stack" to walk.
The important question is... (Score:1)
Oh wait, yes it does. Never mind then.
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no, it walks linux
I, for one, welcome our new hexapod overlords! (Score:2)
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It's better than your hexamech.
Haters gonna hate.
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That's not hate. It is disappointment. We were all expecting for so much more from this.
Some appropriate tags (Score:3)
#notarobot
#notquick
#bumpyride
#ihatespiders
#diedubstepdie
Sorry, expect downvotes (Score:2)
Reminds me of the Timberjack (Score:5, Informative)
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Brain. (Score:1)
Am I the only one who read the headline three times, before realizing it said "LINUX brain" instead of "HUMAN brain"?
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Apparently so.
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Which from the actual story seems like a more accurate description. It has a human brain, just like a car.
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Thank you - I feel ever so slightly vindicated, now. :)
The point? (Score:2)
What is the point of this?
It's slow and probably consumes a lot of fuel.
I'd rather take a car or a motorcycle.
PC/104? ugh. (Score:4, Interesting)
From personal experience.
Never put a PC/104 setup in a system that's going to be subjected to vibration, you'll cause the connector to wear out and eventually one of the important pins on the PC/104 connector will fail. And when it does, the ISA bus presented on the PC104 connector doesn't have any error detection/correction either, meaning your system may not fail gracefully.
Not something you want in a large robot.
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Never put a PC/104 setup in a system that's going to be subjected to vibration
PC-104 is rather retro at this point, but there is something called a Can-Tainer [dpie.com] for using PC-104 in hostile environments. "Internally, each corner of the PC/104 stack is held in place by a rubber corner system ... Externally, the anodized aluminum enclosure mates with a thick rubber-mounting pad..."
We tried one of those in 2003-2005 for our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. (Getting board stacks into the Can-Tainer is a huge pain.) Even then, PC-104 was retro. We ended up with Tri-M industrial Pentium 4 PC
My baby. My mechanical masterpiece! (Score:2)
.
Closing statement (Score:2)
// Design + Build = Inspire;
I can see why they commented it out.
What is the point? (Score:2)
Slow as heck and can't actually climb anything (as far as I can tell from the video) which is the only real reason to have legs instead of wheels.
BEAM me up. (Score:2)
Wonder if BEAM [beam-wiki.org] is being used behind the scenes?
Dupe (Score:1)
Finally! (Score:2)