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

RoweBits Year In Review

The best of the year was:

- violin playing robots from Toyota started just 3 years ago
- Fanuc fast arms - prize winner in Japan
- utility experiment proving power negotiation pays - driving smart everything electrical in the future
- more and better robots everywhere

The best from RoweBots was:

- Launch of DSPnano v2 - DSP RTOS for tiny tiny Linux compatible DSP applications
- Completion of Unison v4 - RTOS for tiny tiny Linux compatible applications
- Tighter robotics focus with lower cost software solutions packaged for applications - coming soon!

Autonomous Robots Starting To Become Real

A recent post related to portable supercomputers shows just how easy and inexpensive it is becoming to produce high performance computers capable of doing advanced analysis on their environment using smart sensors.

If you can build a machine so inexpensively ($2470) which can have twice the power of deep blue and be a checkable airline bag, we are definitely close to a breakthrough.

According to James Albus (of NIST) another two orders of magnitude should do it and service robots should be possible.

Coming to your home sometime soon....

And now the floodgates start to open... Tilera Ships

Hey;

Finally the new Sun chip has some competition. There is a good link dealing with this product here.

I am a bit surprised that the chip doesn't just have memory, not L2 if it is intended for embedded applications. I think the real story is that it is intended to be more general purpose but the embedded market for H.264 and other applications seemed a bit easier to penetrate near term.

In the future expect to see chips like this optimized for embedded applications.

Microchip dsPIC and DSPnano Offer Ultimate Integration

The Masters was great. I must say that meeting the CEO Steve was a real highlight. He is so practical and down to earth. I'm sure that he has had much to do with the great performance that they have seen over many years.

The DSPnano for dsPIC product is highly complementary to the offerings that they have created at Microchip. Their focus has been tiny I/O modules and debug tools. Our focus is open source DSP RTOS tools which offer POSIX compliance, DSP libraries and next generation development environments. As it turns out, we offer the glue that it takes to exploit many smaller components for dsPIC and build a total solution.

For example, voice processing, SPI, Lin, USB, TCP, I2C and much more can be quickly and easily integrated into the RTOS with the POSIX interface and all calls can be standardized. The development can use the latest Eclipse technology and debugging and display of target data levers off MPLAB, ICD2 and REAL ICE technologies.

The most amazing thing is that you can now cut your design time substantially. This combination along with 3-5 week lead times for parts accelerates your growth and lets you improve faster than your competition. Just ask Steve or read his book - this is a winning formula.

Microchip dsPIC Expectations High

At the Master's 2007 its clear that Microchip is continuing to execute on its 16 bit strategy for micro-controllers and digital signal controllers. The number of applications is staggering for me and the chip volumes that are being shipped as well as the revenue generation from this company is staggering.

It was only just over fourteen years ago that they were on the brink of insolvency. Since this time they have transformed their business to dominate the low end micro-controller business worldwide. They are now number one in both volume and dollars.

Four years ago Microchip added the 16 bit line of products and they are doing as well or better from their introduction as the original PIC. The scenario is exciting because they are delivering superior price performance at the lower end and dominating first on volume and then on overall revenue. Congratulations to all those hard working people at Microchip!

The fallout from this for multicore is a bit obscure, but I don't see why they aren't considering using multiple dsPICs in a single core for very low power higher performance applications. They are great engineers so look for this in a couple of years.