Robot programming in Lisp/Scheme

(cross-posting to cll)

Brian Adkins wrote:

On Sun, 25 Mar 2007 00:24:14 -0400, Brian Adkins


One option you can consider is having a small robot that has a wifi
interface, so the programming can stay on your PC, and the robot can just
have a fairly simple wifi module and a microcontroller to interface to the
sensors and actuators.

Later,
Jon

--------------------------------------------------------------
   Jon Hylands      Jon@huv.com      http://www.huv.com/jon

  Project: Micro Raptor (Small Biped Velociraptor Robot)
           http://www.huv.com/blog

Thanks. Do you know of any robot kits that include wifi capability?

Hi,

I don't know directly of any small robots that support WiFi directly but
most have a serial port so you could use an X-Port (or is it Wi-Port) for
communication.

Regards
Ian Dobson

Home of the Atmel based UDP mobile web cam http://www.planet-ian.com
All mails scanned with av-filter.pl (F-Prot / perl)


->>> heavier batteries to supply the power a mini-PC would require would add
->>> weight and thus size, so I expect I'd be limited to a wheel based bot
->>> vs. leg based.
->> One option you can consider is having a small robot that has a wifi
->> interface, so the programming can stay on your PC, and the robot can
just
->> have a fairly simple wifi module and a microcontroller to interface to
->> the
->> sensors and actuators.
->
-> Thanks. Do you know of any robot kits that include wifi capability?
->>
->> Later,
->> Jon
->> --------------------------------------------------------------
->>    Jon Hylands      Jon@huv.com      http://www.huv.com/jon
->>
->>   Project: Micro Raptor (Small Biped Velociraptor Robot)
->>            http://www.huv.com/blog

On Mon, 26 Mar 2007 12:52:14 -0400, Brian Adkins


I don't know of any kits (well, except for the one I'm putting together,
but its a Bioloid-based humanoid), but it wouldn't be all that hard to
build one configured that way.

Later,
Jon

--------------------------------------------------------------
   Jon Hylands      Jon@huv.com      http://www.huv.com/jon

  Project: Micro Raptor (Small Biped Velociraptor Robot)
           http://www.huv.com/blog

There are a lot of options in between -- gumstix, palm pilot, small
68k/coldfire boards, etc -- all of which will outperform lego bricks
by orders of magnitude, all of which will use less power than a full
pc by an order of magnitude, and all of which have scheme/lisp
environments available.  It really just comes down to how much
processing power you really need, and if you're seriously considering
lego, a pc is probably overkill.

Think carefully about whether you really want to make your robot
dependent on an offboard computer -- I've built "robots" like that
before.  Sure, it's convenient as hell for programming/debugging, but
in a way it's disappointing to go through all that effort and still
not have something truly autonomous.

-chris.


MindStormshttp://www.yuasa.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yuasa/xs/index.html

MindStormshttp://www.yuasa.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yuasa/xs/index.html

 > There are a lot of options in between -- gumstix, palm pilot, small
 > 68k/coldfire boards, etc -- all of which will outperform lego bricks
 > by orders of magnitude, all of which will use less power than a full
 > pc by an order of magnitude, and all of which have scheme/lisp
 > environments available.  It really just comes down to how much
 > processing power you really need, and if you're seriously considering
 > lego, a pc is probably overkill.

Cool, thanks for the tips. I hadn't come across gumstix, and it looks
very interesting.

I'm new to robotics, so I'm still trying to determine appropriate lines
of demarcation between the components. I suppose that if the computing
unit (microcontroller, Palm, etc.) can speak serial, then that should be
sufficient to communicate with a servo controller and sensors, and you
can swap out a microcontroller for a Palm device, etc.

Having a stable platform that I can use on multiple robots sounds
appealing, so, for example, to use a Palm device and be able to reuse
code for a variety of robots (at least higher level functions) would be
great. Of course, it would be inconvenient to have to stop the robot to
answer an incoming call on my Treo :)

Do you know of companies providing the necessary hardware/software to
interface a Palm device with robotics hardware?

The main reason Lego came up was because I discovered the Lisp
environment; however, I don't think it works on NXT, so it may not be
feasible for me.

 > Think carefully about whether you really want to make your robot
 > dependent on an offboard computer -- I've built "robots" like that
 > before.  Sure, it's convenient as hell for programming/debugging, but
 > in a way it's disappointing to go through all that effort and still
 > not have something truly autonomous.

Good point. I guess the best of both worlds would be to have the desktop
development environment be the same as the on board environment.

 >
 > -chris.