“As children, many of us watched TV shows like The Jetsons and dreamed about the day we might have our own robot maids, mechanics, and assistants. Evolution Robotics says it’s making this happen. The Pasadena, Calif., company has released an operating system designed for the personal-robotics industry and says it hopes to do for that industry what Windows did for the PC. The Evolution Robotics Software Platform contains everything a company needs to develop and program robots, says Jennifer McNally, the company’s senior director of marketing. It consists of a robot-control architecture, core software modules, and a set of developer’s tools, she says.” Read the story at InformationWeek.
Develop Your Own Robotic Applications for the Real World
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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An open source equivalent of this would be great for amateurs…those Robot War shows are sometimes fun and motivating to get into the hardware side of things.
http://www.evolution.com/
$10k to get going seams high, not really targeting the home builder. I don’t see why there would be a need for a open source equivalant. A lower cost or free equivalant would be nice. I think there would be much better solutions around than this. I would like to see this kind of thing implemented on shows like battlebots. Have them be real robots letting a computer doing the driving.
I see the $10k is there whole shebang kit with a labtop and stuff. Would be nice if they had just the software for sale. I don’t need stepper motors and such, most peoples projects probly have there own hardware that will make no use of them.
From what I read, the selling of the software and hardware components is finely grained and you only need to buy however few components you need, whatever that might be. I’m sure that they will sell you just the software only and let you use your own hardware if you want – it looks like they even sell their software modules in various separate pieces.
It says you must know C++ to use it. I guess the whole thing is written in C++. Doesn’t it make more sense to write it in Java? Anyone can learn Java in hours or days and it will make porting much quicker. Plus the time savings when programming in Java (for the end users).
You guys every heard of robocode? http://robocode.alphaworks.ibm.com/home/home.html
There was a province wide highschool competition last week over here in Ontario. Kids who barely knew VB were programming robots in hours using Java.
I think speed could be an issue. Plus i’m not sure how java gets implemented. But robots are programmed at a low level, maybe this is lower than where java is implemmeted. What is the state of java in linux? Course I don’t think basic C++ is hard at all to learn. I don’t think this sort of thing would be very hard to learn how to do.
Java is only slow when useing the Swing API (graphics tool kit) on slow computers. There are faster alternatives like IBM’s SWT tool kit.
Java is almost as fast as C++. Infact, it has beaten C++ in certain benchmarks. I’ve got some link if anyone’s interested. The JVM knows the exact chip it is running on, so it can take advantage of chip optimizations. I don’t think C++ can do that.
A lot of it would have to be done in C++ cause java can’t do low level stuff. But, what I was thinking of was a java layer on top of the libraries and stuff.
Sun is supporting java on linux and they reslease a new versions of the platform along with the windows and solaris versions. So, from what i can tell, the state of java in linux is preatty good, especially considering that the linux APIs aren’t bugged like windows APIs.
Oh suuuureee, robots… I have seen the japanese movies, they’ll turn against us…already there was a worker killed by a robot on an assembly line… it is the start
don’t worry roger, if they turn on us, we’ll get john conner to lead our army to victory (after they destroyed 95% of the planet). If they send the T1000 back in time to the 1990s, we’ll be ready for that too.