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2 Apr 2004 AI4U
(Journeyer)
31 Mar 2004 aplumb
(Journeyer)
31 Mar 2004 steve
(Master)
31 Mar 2004 cschur
(Journeyer)
31 Mar 2004 mally
(Observer)
30 Mar 2004 Spoons
(Journeyer)
29 Mar 2004 lumpy
(Journeyer)
26 Mar 2004 Kiryu
(Master)
19 Mar 2004 kunal
(Journeyer)
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4 Apr 2004 Tia
(Observer)
2 Apr 2004 mogh
(Observer)
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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.
Read more... (2 replies)
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".
Read more... (1 reply)
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.
Read more... (3 replies)
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