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2 Apr 2004 WhoPhlungPoo (Master)
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*PC/104 Design Contest Winners Announced
The PC/104 Embedded Consortium has announced (PDF format) the winners of their 2004 design contest. The winner in the commercial category was SavantSense, a multi-channel data acquisition, processing, and storage unit. More interesting was the winner of the research category: the USC AVATAR Project. The AVATAR UAV is a robot helicopter designed around dual PC/104 stacks that provide GPS waypoint navigation, autonomous vision-based landing, autonomous sensor-based take-off, and image processing. Judges at this year's contest included Steve Ciarcia and our own Roger Arrick.

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*Killer UCAVs on the Way
Noah Shachtman has written an interesting update on UCAVs (unmanned combat aerial vehicles) being developed by the US military such as the Boeing X-45 and Northrop Grumman X-47A that we've reported on quite a bit in the past. The article references a recent Wired story on UCAVs. In an amusing follow-up, Noah also mentions a Vietnam-era drone that saw some action over Baghdad.

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*EPIC: A New SBC Form Factor
A LinuxDevices.com article carries the news that five manufacturers of single-board computers (SBCs) announced a new industry standard form factor called EPIC at this year's Embedded Systems Conference. EPIC boards will be 115mm by 165mm which is larger than PC/104 but smaller than the EBX standard. The EPIC standard includes on-board PC/104 and PC/104-Plus connectors for expansion boards. The standard also allows PC-style connectors for I/O instead of the pin-headers common on PC/104 designs.

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*Terrans vs Cosmists = Gigadeath
Utah State University professor Hugo de Garis gave a lecture on March 25th about his theory of an impending war between Terrans, Cosmists, and Artilects that will result in Gigadeath for humanity. Most of these terms were coined by de Garis. Artilects are "god-like, massively intelligent machines" that will exterminate humanity or replace it with something better; Terrans are humans who believe Artilects should never be built; Cosmists are humans who believe Artilects should be built; and Gigadeath is what happens to humans when massively intelligent machines deal with them the way humans deal with mosquitos. Or to put it in SF terminology. Artilects are Berserkers, Terrans are life, and Cosmists are what Berserkers call Goodlife. The Utah Statesmen has the full story. And, for the record, de Garis considers himself a Cosmist.

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*Robomote and Mobile Sensor Networks
Since we first reported on Smart Dust back in May of 2001, lots of progress has been made in two directions. The smallest motes are still steadily shrinking towards the size of dust. Meanwhile, the big motes are getting smarter and evolving into COTS Dust and mote-based mobile sensor networks. Robomote is a mote developed by the USC Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems. Robomote is a macro mote designed to act as part of a mobile sensor network made up of hundreds or thousands of identical robots that would monitor the environment. A recently published a working paper (PDF format) from CRES describes the AVR-based Robomote and its potential applications in detail. Many of the design features of the Robomote could be applied to any small, mobile robot.

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*Israeli Mini UAVs Fight Terrorists
BBC News posted a small article today on several tiny UAVs that were revealed recently by Israeli Military. There are two "mini-drones", called Birdy and the Spy as well as two "micro-drones", the Mosquito and the Mosquito 1.5. The Mosquito UAV, the smallest of the group, has a wingspan of 33 cm and weighs just 250 grams. The UAVs are already being used by ground units to gather aerial intelligence on terrorist activities in the Palestinian territories. A Haaretz News article mentions these UAVs and there's also a Slashdot article on this one with the usual well-informed user comments. And, last, a mention of a planned, 100 gram UAV the size of a credit card can be found in an AFP press release from earlier this year.

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*T-52 Enryu Hyper Rescue Robot
Roland Piquepaill's latest blog entry describes the T-52 Enryu Hyper rescue robot, a 3.5 meter high, 5 ton, teleoperated robot built by Tmsuk, the same company that built the much smaller Banryu home guard robot that we've reported on in the past. More info and photos of the T-52 can be found at SpaceDaily.com, RoboticSpot, Yahoo! news, and dottocoumu. That last link has some fun video of Enryu ripping the door off of a car and picking up a steel girder in one hand.

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*FIRST Competitions in the News
Chris Bergeron of PC Burn emailed to say they've done a story on Connecticut's regional FIRST robotics competition. Several other FIRST stories have come up recently including a SpaceRef.com article on the Chesapeake FIRST Regional, an Elk Valley Times article on the Falcons winning the St. Louis regional, a South Bend Tribune article on the Chicago regional, and a Tehachapi News article on the Phoenix regional,

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*PC/104+ Robotics Drivers for Linux
A new robot control software package aimed at PC/104+ users has been released. The new software, called dio48s, includes drivers for the ACCES 104-DIO-48S digital I/O board, up to 8 Polaroid ultrasonic sensors, and an interface to a PIC controller for motor control with encoder feedback. Dio48s is Free Software written in C and licensed under the GNU GPL.

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*VIA Nano-ITX Update
VIA Technologies officially announced their EPIA N Nano-ITX motherboard a few days ago. In theory it will ship next month but it's unlikely to be available to retail customers for a few more months due to high demand by OEM customers such as Hoojum Design. For more on the new Nano-ITX, see the recent stories at Info World, PC World, and Linux Devices.

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*Passion of the RoboChrist
The Online Sun and Ananova report that Mel Gibson used a robot Christ in his recent movie, Passion of the Christ. The £220,000 robot was used during the crucifixion scenes because the weather was too cold for actor Jim Caviezel. According to another site, the animatronic Christ was operated by Mel Gibson himself. The robot was created by Keith Vanderlaan's Captive Audience Productions. In addition to realistic head movements, the robot also bleeds and appears to breathe. This could give a whole new meaning to the phrase, "I'll be back".

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*ROBOlympics this Weekend
Despite a run-in with the US Olympic Committee, the ROBOlympics will take place this weekend as originally planned. According to a recent nature article, the competition has already attracted more than 400 robots from 11 nations. Roland Piquepaille's weblog also has a write up on the event along with a few photos.

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