Cannibot Report Untrue

The alleged cannibot's manufacturer strongly disputes the Fox News report, saying that the self-fueling bots only process plant matter like twigs, grass, and wood chips. They further state that, since desecration of the dead is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, they would not consider that as a potential fuel source. Fox News for its part has now retracted the story liked above; the link now goes to a stub saying that the bots are strictly vegan and pointing to a corrected story.

Since they make no pretense of defending their original sensationalistic story, this appears to be a major mistake on the part of Fox News and on my part for uncritically accepting their story.

Some Interesting Robot Footage

At the beggining of this PJTV segment.

Note: I only recommend the first 1:45 or so for the footage. After that, I didn't find the ensuing discussion of robotics or AI particularly entertaining or informative. The political viewpoint of the panelists may also prove annoying to some.

Cannibots (Update: Not So Much)

My title isn't exactly correct for this article, since these battlebots won't be feeding off of each other, but instead human and animal carcasses.

While it's a neat idea to make use of carrion and corpses as a fuel source, I'll go out on a limb and predict that these will almost immediately be misused. Problems with international law and regulations saying one must house, feed, and give trials to wounded prisoners? Just send a bunch of these robots in with convenient "bugs" that accidentally let these bots feed on the still living. Don't want to sacrifice low-level personnel to torture inmates? Just let a cannibot into a room full of restrained prisoners and see how fast someone talks once the first guy gets slowly consumed. Added bonus: they can be mass produced and they're great for domestic crowd control too.

Update (7/22/09): The bot's manufacturer strongly disputes the Fox News report, saying that the bots only process plant matter like twigs, grass, and wood chips. They further state that, since desecration of the dead is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, they would not consider that as a potential fuel source. Fox News for its part has now retracted the story liked above; the link now goes to a stub saying that the bots are strictly vegan and pointing to a corrected story.

Since they make no pretense of defending their original sensationalistic story, this appears to be a major mistake on the part of Fox News and on my part for uncritically accepting their story.

Propeller Christmas Tree

While testing its input and output pins in the breadboard, the Propeller chip blinks a slew of LEDs -- reminding me of a strand of Christmas lights.

Prop Prep

In addition to working further with the BoeBot, I've gotten some more advanced components including this breadboard kit based around the Propeller chip. The Propeller chip includes a central CPU and then eight satellite "cog" processors that can independently do tasks. And it comes in a single 40-pin DIP package that costs about $12. The cogs can run tasks at 80 MHz, allowing them to process video at reasonable resolution in real-time.

This weekend I celebrated Independence Day by putting together the kit. Here are some snapshots from the assembly process:

Better Behaved Bug

I played around with the photoresistor alignment and the relative settings of the two potentiometers and was able to get more desirable behavior from the photophilic bug, so I thought I'd post two more short videos:

Heading towards the light in an adjacent room:



Following a flashlight beam in a dark room:

Second Soldering Project: Photophilic Bug

I had a second cheap and simple soldering project to finish which I had bought roughly a month ago. It's a simple robot that uses two vibrating DC motors as "legs" and has two photoresistors as eyes. If it senses no light, it stops. If both photoresistors sense lights both motors turn on and the bug charges forward. If one photoresistor senses light and the other one does not, the one in the dark turns off the motor to the opposite (i.e., the light-facing) side, causing the bug to pivot back toward the light. It also has two potentiometers to allow one to calibrate the sensitivity of the photoresistors on both sides so it can follow, for example, a flashlight beam on the floor of a dark room.

That's the theory. In practice, the alignment of the photoresistors and the calibration of the potentiometers is a little difficult. As you'll see, I can generally get it to follow light, but it often goes in circles or senses stray reflections and heads into corners and gets stuck. I could probably spend some time to calibrate it better, but I did it for the soldering practice rather than to create a robot I could steer acurately.

Due to the locomotion system, it's useless on carpet. But as you'll see, it's surprisingly fast on my kitchen floor.

Brief Intro:



Showing the difficulties of steering the bug:



Charge!:

Robotic Hummingbird

Brief article here. Here's the video:



It seems like a cool and important first step.

RC Low-Pass Filter

Using the oscilloscope, I examine the behavior of a simple low-pass RC circuit. The circuit has R = 150 KOhm and C = .01 μF, for an RC constant of 1.5 ms and an f3dB of 100 Hz.

Camera can see what you cannot

Updated with slightly better video....



This is the camera I'm using here.

3...2...1...and...video!