Bruce Boyes's Blog

December 2005 Archives

Boy & frog invent square wheel car

This blog on ZDNET provides links to video and a press release from Global Composites and Distributed Robotics, both in NY state. Here's a PDF press release. If you want a smoother ride, here's a video of an elliptical wheel version.

The inventor, Jason Winckler can be seen here with his frog Edna. This may be the same Jason Winclker who plays soccer for Tamarac Middle School.

It's an interesting idea, but can spinning a weight around really be more efficient than driving round wheels? The inventors suggest using other forces instead of gravity; perhaps in special applications (where such a force normal to the plane of motion is available) might be very effective. All I can think of right now is the "screen door in a submarine" - where the flow of water perpendicular to the screen would provide a huge force which is easily tapped. So there you have it - the basic concept for a novel submarine screen door cleaner robot. If you make a million from this idea, please send me a check.

Similar ideas have been around for a while: driving a square-wheel vehicle over a road composed of inverted catenaries, as seen here.

Steering such a vehicle is a bit complicated, since it easily interferes with the synchronization of the wheels.

And what easier way to experiment with your own version of this than with Legos(tm)!
http://news.lugnet.com/technic/?n=14950
http://news.lugnet.com/technic/?n=14970

OMG Robotics report from Burlingame

On behalf of Systronix and java.net, Bruce Boyes (that would be me) presented a proposal to standardize robotic I/O point tagging in a manner similar to the IEEE1451 STIM (Sensor-Transducer Interface Module). Systronix has developed a robotic tagging API, Java packages, and working examples. This package will soon be posted in the java.net robotics community.

It will come as no surprise that there are many ideas about what should be specified, and how. At the end of the presentations, it was proposed that we consider four different task force areas:
Middleware - with some sharing concerns about size and footprint
Component Profiles - including I/O point tagging
Service Profiles
Data Structures
(Don't ask me exactly what these mean since no is really sure.)

This feels like good progress to me, though there is nothing concrete quite yet. There is good interest among active participants, which means that there might actually be people to work on the standards committees. Based on this hopeful sign, OMG approved advancing the Robotis Domain Specific Interest Group to a Domain Task Force.

The next meeting is in Feb 2006 in Tampa, and there is still time to submit an RFI response, up until 3 weeks before the Tampa meeting. The java.net robotics community is planning to submit an RFI, based on the I/O point tagging idea, and maybe others. If you have some ideas, you are welcome to join this effort.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.