The following is from the pages of EE Times, published by CMP Media.
Maybe we can use these things to keep track of electric cars or to
read signs ...
Posted: 9:00 p.m., EST, 6/11/98
Sony proposes open architecture for entertainment robots
By Yoshiko Hara
TOKYO - The folks who brought you the Walkman are readying what they
hope will be the next big fad in personal entertainment: robots. Sony
Corp. has proposed its freshly minted Open-R (Open Robot) architecture
as an open platform for a market niche that does not yet exist.
"Sony wants to create a very new entertainment robot market," said
Toshi T. Doi, president of Sony's D21 Laboratory, which pursues
digital technologies for the coming century. "We have developed the
Open-R architecture and want to invite many companies to join the
entertainment robot arena based on the format."
Entertainment robots, as Sony defines them, are consumer products
designed just for play. Sony researchers demonstrated robots
scampering after a ball, kicking it and exhibiting other behaviors
sophisticated enough to give people the illusion they were playing
with a puppy or a kitten. The little tykes walked, sat, stood up, lay
down and rolled over on their backs.
The prototype robot is about the size of a very small puppy - roughly
three pounds and 5 x 10 x 9 inches. It runs on a 64-bit MIPS RISC
processor with 8 Mbytes of DRAM and a newly developed IC. This core
system controls attached hardware modules such as head, legs, hands
and tail, each with motors and a control chips of its own.
A 180,000-pixel CCD sensor works as the robot's eye, and a microphone
and speaker do duty as ear and voice. Application programs - in the
demo they were pet behaviors - are implemented by way of PC cards.
Tomorrow's toy
Though Sony has not yet made a marketing plan, Doi said the company is
aiming to have some form of robot product out before the end of this
century. "We have no idea how big the market will be," he said.
Built around Sony's proprietary Aperios real-time operating system,
the Open-R architecture makes it possible to change a robot's body by
exchanging hardware modules - substituting a wheel for the back legs,
for example. The CPU communicates with each module through the 12-MHz,
12-Mbit/second Open-R bus, and makes an optimum setting based on the
parameters stored in the module. Therefore, the modules support hot
plug, sort of like an electronic Mr. Potato Head.
"There are various applications available in PC card form, such as
wireless LAN. Open-R robots can make use of them as is," said Doi.
Sony developed a chip of about a half million gates that integrates a
DSP and graphics-processing engine for signal and IF processing. Sony
does not yet have a practical plan of how it will license the
architecture or offer the chip, according to Doi.
Sony will stage exhibition soccer games using the prototype robots at
RoboCup '98, an academic conference on robot technology to be held in
Paris July 4-8. Sony has provided robots to research groups at three
universities - Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh; Osaka University in
Japan; and to a university in Paris - and the three teams are
developing software. In the exhibition games, three robots on a single
team will match with another group's robots independently, without any
remote control.
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All material on this site Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc. All rights
reserved.
-- Lloyd Rasmussen
Senior Staff Engineer, Engineering Section
National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped
Library of Congress 202-707-0535
(work) lras@loc.gov http://www.loc.gov/nls/
(home) lras@sprynet.com http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/lras/
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