Robot Gossip

News and updates from robot society

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

RobuROC 6 Outdoor Robot Platform Rocks

New from French company Robosoft:

RobuROC 6 outdoor mobile platform features :

- Lenght : 160 cm
- Width : 78 cm (including wheels)
- Height : 50 cm

- Wheels diam. : 50 cm
- estimated weight (incld. batteries) : 160 Kgr (Li-ion batteries) (350 lbs)
- Step clearance : around 400 mm (capable to climb standard stairs)
- Speed :around 3,61 m/s (8 mph)

- Max slope : 45°

- Max Payload : Around 100 Kg (220 lbs)
- Turn radius : 0 - turns on the spot.
- Power : 3 Li-ion battery pack
- Runtime : 3-5 Hrs

The rolling base has a unique structure of three body sections with two wheels each that can flex
side-to-side and up-and-down. This allows it to be able to scamper up over obstacles.

The robot will be shown for the first time at the Eurosatory2006 military hardware show this
week in Paris.
sikharpax the robot rat is the creation of a team of French roboticists. Rather than setting their sights on
human-level intelligence, they're trying to figure out and replicate the behaviors of a simpler creature - the
rat.

(Psikharpax robot rat)

"The rat is the animal that scientists know best, and the structure of its brain is similar to that of humans,"
says Steve Nguyen, a doctoral student at ISIR, who helped show off Psikharpax at a research and
innovation fair in Paris last week.

Psikharpax has two cameras for eyes, two microphone ears and a set of tiny wheels for locomotion. Four
inch whiskers do more than decorate its pointed snout; these vibrassae are intended to be a part of the
robot's sensory system, just like that of an organic rat.

Data from these artificial organs goes to Psikharpax's "brain," a chip whose software hierarchy mimicks
the structures in a rat's brain that process and analyse what is seen, heard and sensed.

For instance, if Psikharpax's eyes sense that it is dark, the software gives a greater weight of importance
to data from the whiskers, in the same way that a rat, at night, relies on other sensors to compensate for
loss of vision.

Robot rat survival is the goal - avoiding human beings on the one hand while finding 'food' - electricity
provided at power points throughout the lab.

I'm very fond of science-fictional robotic rodents, like those in the 1950 story There Will Come Soft Rains,
Ray Bradbury wrote about a fully automated house with little cleaning robots:

Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were acrawl with the small cleaning animals,
all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their mustached runners, kneading the rug
nap, sucking gently at hidden dust.
(Read more about Ray Bradbury's robot mouse)

Okay, now here's a weird idea, French researchers: build your robot rat with neurons from an actual rat.
See Gordon The Robot Uses Cultured Rat Neurons; but maybe that would be cheating...