Intel combines Robots, WLANs, and Linux

An anonymous reader writes "This article by a researcher in Intel's Emerging Platforms Lab details some of Intel's current research into wireless, mobile robotics technology. A key goal of the effort, according to the article, is to efficiently combine the two technologies -- mobile robotics and wireless networks -- so that mobile robots can serve as gateways into wireless sensor networks. The Intel project is providing robotics researchers with a robotics development package that includes standardized silicon, a Linux-based open-source operating system, and open-source software drivers for robotics applications. Additionally, Intel has released a test version of a technical library for building Bayesian networks, which will help advance the ability of robots to navigate their environments, and pilot systems based on Intel's open-source packages are already being deployed in a variety of flexible environments in agricultural, security, and military applications."

Free robot Mind is available

[Mentifex]

Mind.Forth [scn.org] is free AI source code for a robot AI Mind in Win32Forth.

Mind-1.1 in JavaScript [virtualentity.com] is the AI Tutorial version of the same robot Mind software for true artificial intelligence.

AI4U: Mind-1.1 Programmer's Manual [barnesandnoble.com] is the textbook of artificial intelligence describing the Robot Mind-1.1 software of the Mentifex AI project as listed in the Free Software Donation Directory. [q-ag.de]

Technological Singularity [caltech.edu] is happening right now.

Intel Stayton boards

[CTho9305]

These boards are really cool (Stayton is used on the CMU TagBots). We [roboticsclub.org] (CMU Robotics Club) normally use a board [roboticsclub.org] designed by robotics club members to control robots, but they are based on 20MHz PICs, and don't have and wireless support (at least presently). When combined with the Intel board, however, the big processing can be done there, and the Cerebellum can just be used as a smart motor driver and sensor interface board.

This lets the robots run more complex code and communicate with each other wirelessly. Intel has provided CMU with enough boards for a LOT of cool projects.

Some of this has been done before

[Steve1952]

The idea of using robots to communicate to wireless sensors has been around for a while. See, for example, USPTO patent application 20020173877.

Re:Looks interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

My undergraduate research advisor, a leading researcher in the field of non-linear controls applied to robotic problems, had a saying which will answer your question pretty well: "Simulations are doomed to succeed."

Here at Carnegie Mellon, most of our mobile robots used for research are controlled in one of two ways:
1) a pc/104 stack has been added onto the robot.
2) some poor graduate student's laptop has been tied down on top of the robot.

Putting laptops on top of robots is a nice hackish solution, but it's not really optimal if you're not doing massive computations. pc/104 stacks are neat, but, for a very small robot, they can take up a lot of room. Combining several functions of the pc/104 stack into one card is key here. Pretty much every robot that goes scurrying through the halls of Newell Simon hall has an orinoco wireless card sticking out of it.