FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Canterbury, Kent, UK
Rarely have I had the opportunity, as a grad student, to spend other people’s money.
I have decided that I like it.
Based on a hint dropped by Brad, I poked Christian, and while I was at ITiCSE 2004 he put together a small bid for some end-of-year funds. As a result of this odd causal chain, we have some funding to buy some toys. These toys will support Christian’s research, the Cool Stuff in Computer Science project, hopefully find their way into some classrooms at Kent, and potentially provide other researchers at Kent with some creative outlets for their research as well.
| To start, we’re going to pick up a Palm Pilot Robotics Kit. This name is a bit dated now; originally developed at Carnegie Mellon, it was intended to be driven by a Palm Pilot. We’re getting a slightly more interesting bot; it has it’s own small computer on-board (called the BrainStem). This little computer handles communicating with the drive motors and sensors; it could handle running programs, but we’re interested in doing some pretty complex stuff. While it certainly would be possible to do it using just the BrainStem, we want to be able to really cool things, like… run a web server on our robot! (There’s practical reasons for that, actually.) While running a web server on a handheld may seem silly, the truth is that a real computer makes doing really interesting things really easy. |  |
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So, we’re buying a Sharp Zaurus 5500. This PDA is interesting to us because it has:
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What does this mean? The computer I took to college had a 66MHz processor, 12MB of RAM, and a 400MB disk drive. This handheld computer is three times as fast, has three times as much RAM, and I can easily put add another 512MB of storage to the PDA; the handheld and wireless card together cost approximately $280. If I add in the 512MB of storage, the entire handheld computer would cost $360. With the storage, the handheld is still five times cheaper than the computer I took to with me to university.
The Zaurus is a full-fledged computer. The BrainStem (on the robot) will be “slaved” to the Zaurus; we’ll program the handheld computer, and it will tell the robot what to do. This means we can program our robots in C, Java, occam, Python, and (most importantly) MzScheme! (Well, actually, the bit about programming in occam is important to Christian’s research, but we won’t talk about that right now. That’s a whole separate post, which includes pointers to a paper we’ll be giving in September.)
We’re planning on picking up a wide range of sensors. Ultrasonic range-finders, a full-colour camera, a compass, flame detector, and some extra motors that can be used to pivot the various sensors in more than one direction. While the kit can’t support all of this at once, we’ll try and enlist the R&D services of a world-class machinist to design some interchangeable mounts for the various sensors.
The purchases will be made in the next week; I’ll be doing some last-minute research, but the folks at Acroname (a robotics outfit out in Boulder, Colorado) have been incredibly helpful. If I can find a way to swing it, we might be able to put together two robotics platforms, but the second one will be even wackier than the first.
If you’ve got any thoughts or opinions on the proposed rig, feel free to leave a comment here (before the 12th of July). Comments (usually) get bounced through to my INBOX, so I tend to see them. In particular, I’m most curious about the power/flexibility of the Zaurus, and whether anyone has actually ever used a PPRK.
Dontcha just love spending other people’s money?
A couple of the cs-sysadmin crowd bought Zaurus palmtops a while back, and I don’t believe they’re using them any more (since they pretty much sucked as palmtops, although they’re moderately useful as unusual Linux machines). It might be worth asking around and seeing if they’d be interested in selling them…