Hardware

The Pandaboard enclosure provides protection for the Pandaboard while keeping all the connector and LCD accessible. It is designed to be cut and modified to adapt the internal connectors as well. It includes an external push button for the reset and user buttons on the board.

It will be available at http://amzn.com/B0050R7QI2

The Home Brew Robotics Club (Silicon Valley, CA) has decided to pool their efforts by selecting a single high-end processor board (currently PandaBoard) to use on their higher end robots.

This will be known as the Robot Reference Platform (RRP).

It has been recognized that keeping up to date with the latest high end processor boards is a never ending effort. As each individual strives to make progress with the next, latest and greatest development, a lot of time is spent reinventing and rediscovering solutions that work.

It is hoped that by defining the RRP and pooling all of the knowledge and information that goes into configuring it, building kernels, selecting software packages, finding additional peripherals and drivers etc, we can advance the use of the RRP and accelerate user progress with these latest exciting technology.

The goal of this project is to establish a desktop environment for Android. Specifically for a living room setting, connected to a large LCD television.
The platform will be partially open source using the Android OS and the Android Marketplace. The Box will be controlled via a Bluetooth All-Inclusive-Trackpad.

The proprietary trackpad will include the following:
Bluetooth 2.1 Capability
Multitouch Capability
Accelerometer
QWERTY stationary monochrome trackpad backlight
(Optional features could include, compass, gyro, and a VGA camera)

The DroidBox will perform very similar to the current Droid smart phones and tablets. All the input sensors found in a typical Droid tablet would be included in the proprietary trackpad. The purpose of the platform is to create a cheap family media center that is supported by many current Android Apps. Games and productivity apps alike, could be ran from the couch. The box should be small, lightweight, limited in overall features, and most importantly cheep.

Many extended features of the OMAP 4 platform could be omitted to further lower production costs. Here are the fundamental requirements:
Bluetooth 2.1 / Wifi bgn
Ethernet 100/1000
1x SD Card Slot
1x HDMI Out
1x USB
1x 5V Power Supply In

TiroKart: the Total Immersion Remotely Operated Go-Kart
This is a specification for what I am trying to achieve with this project:

* Off-road and racing go-kart adapted for computer control.
* Ruggedized on-board PC cluster runs the kart control software and interfaces to the steering, throttle and brake actuators along with the cameras and other sensors.
* Sensors on the kart include stereo cameras, rear view cameras, stereo microphones, GPS, lidar (for collision detection) and telemetry for the kart data (speed etc).
* Wireless data link (802.11n) back to the remote PC cluster.
* Completely separate RC-based remote control for emergency shutdown.
* Remote PC cluster runs the driver interface and performs high-level processing of the data from the kart – especially intelligent collision avoidance.
* Driver interface consists of a 3D stereo display integrating the camera streams from the kart and also a presentation of the data from the kart sensors including audio from the on-board microphones.
* Control is either via a joystick or a steering wheel and pedal setup.
* Semi-autonomous mode implements driver aids – track departure prevention, collision avoidance etc.
* Fully autonomous mode utilizes onboard sensors (GPS, lidar, IMU and vision) to navigate a defined track autonomously.
* Rocamo (the Robotic Camera Operator) is a small mobile robot that autonomously tracks the TiroKart while in operation and provides a video stream from the perspective of a chase vehicle.
* The goal is to be able to drive the kart around as though the driver was sitting in the kart (in a perfect world). The icing on the cake would be to be able to drive a racing go-kart around a track faster than it could go with a person on-board (the TiroKart at least has a big weight advantage!) .

Finally, the software, electronic and mechanical technologies developed during the project will be applied to productized robots to solve selected real world problems.

Follow updates to this project via the development blog url.

Open Hardware Mobile Manipulator is a mobile manipulator robot designed as open hardware.
total build price under $1k
target audiences: (a) univ edu (1 unit/4 students; up to 10 groups/class); (b) maker/hobbyist
This is a design only — users (customize and) build their own from scratch

This project provides a PCB extension to the Beagleboard, Beagleboard-xm and Pandaboard. While the initial motivation was to simply provide a LCD screen - that concept has grown into a complete, portable development board. The high level features of the extension include:

• LCD with touch screen
• User push buttons including power on/off
• Battery, battery charger and battery fuel gauge support
• Full size SD card socket
• Accelerometer
• RS485
• Extension header with GPIOs and I2C bus that are either 3.3V or 5V based.
• Integrated USB JTAG debugger for Beagleboard or Pandaboard.

This project includes the Hardware Design and Implementation as well as the changes needed to the boot loader and Linux kernel to support the hardware. The target operating system is Android 2.3 using the TI Android GingerBread 2.3 DevKit 1.0.

The project is to build an '''autonomous robot''', which plays football with golf balls on 2m x 3m arena by rules of Robotex . Robotex is an annual open Estonian competition of robotics mainly between three largest informatics related universities: University of Tartu, Tallinn University of Technology and Estonian IT College. The goal of the competition is to raise popularity of exact sciences and computer science. Our team is one of participating teams from University of Tartu. This year we are trying to build a smaller and faster robot than any of robots seen on this competition this far. We will design a robot which fits to cylinder of 18cm diameter with height of 15 cm, so it would also comply to size limits of Robocup SSL .

Features of our new robot include:
omnidirectional movement using brushless motors and self-designed omniwheels
positioning using magnetic hall sensors on wheels and data from image processing
localisation and mapping of target balls, goals and the opponent using self designed hyperbolic mirror based omnidirectional camera system

This is about a portable media player with the best balance between price and specs:
-Android 2.3.3 or better
-The device should be social-oriented ( custom and intuitive UI with facebook, twitter, myspace, etc) (something like the INQ smartphones but not facebook exclusive)
-Sound quality must be highest possible (licensing DTS-codecs?)
- Must have a "good" screen (640x360 OLED?)
- Minimalist-industrial design
- Gaming would be an strengh taking in account the 4430 SOC
- Other possibilities: PS certified, android market available or amazon android market, look for partners (amazon, spotify?)
-3G

The device will be oriented to the Latin-American Market and with some carrier partner (Claro and Movistar work on the whole region) with 3G-special plans (social-music streaming-instant messaging exclusive plans -VOIP, streaming videos and "complete" internet would be an extra or wifi only capabilities)

The ipod its the only media player sold in the region with quite a good a acceptance and here its sold at least with 30% over the US price.

Getting an aggressive price with a carrier partner would be a deal breaker on the region.
*Maybe prices like 150,165,180 and 270 USD or eq for 8,16,32 and 64GB but thats full speculation

The Alex platform is a small robot composed of the following parts:

iRobot Create base
2 arms made of Bioloid parts
2 eyes on pan tilt mounts made of Nexus One phones and Bioloid parts
A PandaBoard for central control

Alex is part of a larger project to advance artificial intelligence through embodied ai. Check out the project website for details.

Why Alex is awesome:

Willow Garage had the right idea with the PR2, but the wrong pricepoint. Alex will be the PR2 for the rest of us. We're targeting a pricepoint just north of 1k, as opposed to 400k + for the PR2.

There are thousands of robotics research labs reinventing robots that can move, see, hear, pick up things, make noise, and generally interact with their environment in useful ways. With Alex we plan to stop that cycle of reinvention, and start a cycle of innovation in software.

Why Alex will get done:

Over the last three months, I quit my job, completed an robotics internship at Anybots, and landed a new job in Artificial Intelligence powerhouse. I'm committed to spending significant personal resources on seeing Alex get to production quality and beyond. I've already committed thousands of dollars to support similar projects like the bilibot (bilibot.com). Eventually the Alex project will be a large consumer of PandaBoards, unfortunately you just can't buy one right now!

Alex and Panda:

The mobile robotics space is constrained by space, power, weight, and cpu. We can make use of the significant power available in mobile phones (see the cellbots project) but to provide a powerful central processing system that has room to grow you need a board with the feature set and efficiency of the PandaBoard. If we want to achieve untethered operation there's no better solution than Panda.

(This is the Pandacomb project submission with the official Pandacomb website link.)
Android, as we all know, is everywhere nowadays! Its on our smartphones, media players, netbooks, and tablets. But the problem is that these devices are overly priced and therefore not many people can enjoy the features of the amazing Operating System that is Android. The creators of the Pandaboard have had one goal since its beginning, to bring a fast platform with an affordable price point to the general public. This is where this project comes in. My team and I will try to bring Android 3.0 Honeycomb to the Pandaboard with a working multi-touch screen, drivers, and sensors. In turn our goal is to make a tablet with Android Honeycomb for as cheap as possible but to also use all the great hardware of the Pandaboard to it's full potential.