Gizmo Bot Is Cheap And Effective
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Wednesday, 19 of December , 2007 at 1:26 am
One of the cool things about working in an emerging high tech industry (which is what robotics undoubtedly is) is that you don’t have a be a big corporation with a correspondingly big R&D budget in order to create a useful product. iRobot PackBots are the standard in heavy duty, reconfigurable small field robots, but they cost tens of thousands of dollars or more, which is usually out of the price range of anyone except the military. Javier Rodriguez Molina, a graduate student at UCSD, has designed a robot called Gizmo that offers a lot of high-end field usability and flexibility in a package that costs less than $1000.
Gizmo’s primary feature is the ability to create a large (200m diameter) wireless network bubble, sort of like a LANdroid. Each Gizmo can link with other Gizmos to create an exponentially larger network. This allows Gizmos to communicate with each other and with controllers via computers, cellphones, remote controls, or whatever you want. The Gizmo platform itself is scalable and modular, and allows for mounting and control of cameras, sensors, arms, or (again) whatever you feel like sticking on there. While Gizmo currently runs on wheels, he can be fitted with treads or even, eventually, wings. Says Rodriguez, “people see Gizmo and immediately think of a new idea for what it can do. I’m sure it has important uses that we haven’t even thought of yet.” And that’s the whole point: making Gizmo flexible and inexpensive allows users to spend their money and brain power where it matters… Getting the robot to do exactly what they need it to do.
[ Calit2 ] VIA [ LiveScience ]
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Comment by Andre L. Soares
Made Wednesday, 26 of December , 2007 at 12:30 pm
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