• Question: what\'s the best robot you made so far

    Asked by lepeon3 to Alan on 14 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Alan Winfield

      Alan Winfield answered on 14 Mar 2011:

      Hah, good question. I think the best robot I have made so far – or helped to make – is the LinuxBot. This was a robot that we built about 12 years ago to do research in swarm robotics. Now we can buy robots to do this research but then we had no choice but to invent our own. The LinuxBot is about the size of a dinner plate and had two wheels – each with its own motor – so that it can turn on the spot. It was one of the first robots in the world with the computer operating system Linux running inside it – which meant that we could run powerful programs and connect to the robot over a wireless network. That would be easy nowadays but 12 years ago we had to work really hard to build these robots. Here are some old pictures of the LinuxBot:
      http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/Robots/linuxbot.htm
      (I especially like the one at the bottom with stereo cameras.)

      And here is another page with lots of old lab pictures, many with swarms of LinuxBots running in our arena:
      http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/labpics.htm

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