Technology Changes For Robots

Robots need to be low cost but today's technologies are not getting us there fast enough. The main reason for this is that the architectural approach is incorrect. Robots need completely distributed systems to reduce cost and allow computational engines to become more specialized.

Typical robots today (of the experimental and service varieties) use a central cpu, often an x86 variant, and run Linux of some flavor. They may have some type of RTOS to try and provide better performance to replace Linux but the basic message is that they require a big board and have expensive processors.

A far superior approach is to separate the system into four subsystems. One subsystem is dedicated to motion control, a second is dedicated to power management, third is dedicated to sensors and the forth is the brain of the system. These four subsystems are interconnected and all must be there for complete functioning of the robot.

By separating the systems out, there is a big advantage in that the motion control and any lower bandwidth local sensors near them can be run by a single microcontroller. This single microcontroller can be extremely low cost and a distributed bus or network can be used to communicate among the controllers. This provides high precision motion control in a distributed architecture at very low cost.

In the case of low bandwidth sensors, they are layered on top of the motion network cutting costs. For high bandwidth sensors, a direct high bandwidth connection to the core logic processor is required. For example, Ladar and vision systems require high bandwidth connections to the core logic processor, presumably with integrated hardware based accelerators to speed this processing.

A power management system is required to control power sequencing, special mechanical locks, recharging, and various other power related features. This network can coordinate actions based on the oversite of the core logic processor. This off loads all the power management tasks from the core logic processor, avoiding real-time power management interrupts and improving power management response. Again this is a low cost $2-3 dollar processor for each supply including networking costs.

In terms of the core logic processor, this is a real challenge. The current approaches simply don't offer the kind of performance which is really required. In addition the cost for these processors is generally high. We all need to create new technologies to overcome this unknown.

Sometimes People Surprise Me

When people are angry reasonable people do unreasonable things. For the past month I have been dealing with the fallout of a malicious attack on our internal systems web site and support server.

To our customers I offer my sincere apology for the demise of our web site for the past week. We have done our best to restore it quickly but all takes time. It will return very soon.

Initially I thought that these attacks were simply prompted by anger, but upon further investigation I discovered that fraud was at the heart of their plans. All our customers can rest assured that the perpetrators of these crimes will be dealt with by the courts and will be held responsible for their crimes.

To all of you out there, I recommend the following:

• separate system administration from operational personnel
• triple check all backups
• never subcontract system administration work short term
• automate changing all passwords so it can be done across your systems instantly if possible