A open-source robot is a virtual or mechanical artificial agent that has been designed by crowdsourcing techniques.
Current projects
RV Telepresence robots:
Full robot projects:
- Willow Garage Robot Personal Assistant [1]
- Open Automaton Project (oap.sourceforge.net)
- Leaf Project (www.leafproject.org/)
- RobotCub
- OpenRAVE (http://openrave.programmingvision.com/index.php?title=Main_Page)
- The Humanoid Project (http://humanoid.fy.chalmers.se/)
- e-puck mobile robot, an open-hardware, education oriented, mobile robot.
- Open-source Micro-robotic Project, a open-source space swarm robot project
- Qwerkbot, simple open source robot from Carnegie Mellon University
- Roboware E3 [2]
Open-source software:
- Roborealm (vision software)
- Robot Operating System (open-source software running on the Willow Garage robot)
- Player (robot framework)
- Orca (robot framework)
- MOOS (robot framework)
- Microsoft Robotics Studio (robot framework)
- RUBICS
- CARMEN (robot simulator)
- TeamBots (robot simulator)
- Open Dynamics Engine (physics engine for modelling articulated rigid-body dynamics)
- Simbad (robot simulator)
- Gazebo (multi-robot simulator)
- Dave's Robotic Operating System
Open-source hardware:
- Make Controller Kit
- motherboards with CPU; eg Arduino
Advantages
- Lower-cost. Costs of a robot can be decreased dramatically with prominent examples being the robots being build by Hanson (300$) and project aiko (25000$)
- Interchangable software and/or hardware
Popularity
A first sign of the increasing popularity of being robots yourself can be found with the DIY community. What began with small competitions for remote operated vehicles (eg RobotWars), soon developed to the building of remote operated telepresence robots as Sparky and then true robots (being able to take decisions themselves) as the Open Automaton Project and Leaf Project. Certain commercial companies now also produce kits for making simple robots. One example being DeAgostini.
Uses
At present, open-source robots are not yet sophisticated enough to perform much of the tasks a person can do, nor perform difficult or complicated tasks that only robots may -one day- provide; this being:
- metalworks (precise metal sheets and pipe-bending, sheet/pipe cutting; eg via Multimachine and/or other imbedded tools as cramps, pliers, ...)
- translator for many languages (including the main languages as Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish, Portugese, ...)
- calorie-counter for the robot-owner; counting the calories of fooditems the owner eats and preventing him from eating more that day when he reaches 2000kcal
- building electronic circuitry (PCB-boards)
- transportation; this eg by riding on the back, similar as on a horse (the latter allowing the robot to return to the appearance of a normal person after disembarking)
- personal protection (robots being made of metal and able to withstand quite some beating)
- providing communication (trough a small computer (eg Linutop, EeeBox, gPC, and integrated satellite internet uplink or long-range Wifi or WiMax-antenna)
Dispite this however, some DIY builders are already looking to helpful activities that can be performed today as vacuum cleaning and automated mowing.[3][4]
See also
- Scott Hassan (founder of Willow Garage and senior Google board member)
- STAIRS
- Softbot
- Khepera III