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Robots of Interest Aggregation of Recent Headliners
Robots of Interest Quick rundown of interesting recent stories about robots... The NZ Herald reports of a french company developing a small flying drone that fits in a rucksack and can be assmebled in 3 minutes; Spy Plane in a Backpack. Looks like the ideal gift ;) In the American Side of Asimo, an article on Tech TV, Honda's humanoid is briefly presented. It's operating system, apparently also used by NASA, is described -- apparently providing a fully deterministic behaviour (is that a good thing?) I assume that's low-level since the sensors would be very noisy anyway, so the high-level behaviours would be just as unpredictable as the information gathered. One News is featuring that amazing cow milking system -- Robots Doing the Milking. Technologically it's nothing ground-breaking, but the benefit, originality and success of the machine make it a personal favourite. Finally, Metro Active talks about Kismet, the MIT robot with emotions; Robots Who Cry. The feature is very pertinent, and goes to show how strangely unaccepted it is to feel emotional about a machine. | Alex J. Champandard 935 posts. Sunday 23 June, 14:34 Reply
Deterministic operating systems "Deterministic" performance for an operating system simply means that if you set a task to execute every so many milliseconds (or microseconds) it is absolutely guaranteed to do that. Most operating systems such as Windows don't have deterministic performance, although it is possible to get addon programs for windows NT and XP Embedded to give it that capability. I think the latest version of windows CE is also deterministic, although I'm not completely sure about that (I just overheard someone saying it was). - Bob | motters 136 posts. Sunday 23 June, 16:17 Reply
Real Time Systems That rings a bell... that's what I assumed it was. There's a version of linux that guarantees that (RT Linux?) And other programming languages allow you to take advantage of specific facilities (RT Java & Ada for example). But still, I'm not sure if that makes any difference in the behaviour. My concerns are in the noisy sensors. | Alex J. Champandard 935 posts. Monday 24 June, 04:49 Reply
Determinism Deterministic operating systems just give you the ability to do things with a high degree of accuracy (such as counting encoder pulses at high frequencies). Whether the OS is deterministic or not doesn't really have any impact on things which don't need accurate timing. - Bob | motters 136 posts. Monday 24 June, 13:19 Reply