Smartest Boebot Robot
Mobile robot with 321 Brains
Designed & Built by Humanoido
Boebot is an excellent robot platform for doing experiments. In this power-tethered experiment, the intelligence of BoeBot is massively increased.
Specifications
Processor Chips - 40
Chip Types - BASIC Stamp 2, Propeller
Processor Brains - 321
Structure - Board Stack
Original Platform - Parallax BoeBot
Board Types - Parallax Propeller Proto Boards, Basic Stamp Board of Education
Boards - 20 boards @ 2 Props Each, 1 board with 1 Basic Stamp
Ports - 1,280
Speed - 6,400 MIPS
Power Supply - On Board and Tethered
Software - Motion Stabilization, move, slow, start, stop, ramp
Language - PBASIC, SPIN
Settings - Clock Mode
Forty prop chips, providing 320 tiny RISC computers, are added to BoeBot along with the BASIC Stamp Board of Education using twenty Propeller Proto Boards in a high rising skyscraper stack. Available ports now exceed 1,280 and computational speed tops out above a blazing 6,400 MIPS. The balance point is shifted slightly towards the front of BoeBot to increase stability during motion. Motions are typically slowed to stabilize the platform during travel as Smartest BoeBot carries around his big new brain.
It moves along just fine. If you have seen the space shuttle being moved with a special transport to the gantry, it sort of resembles the Smartest BoeBot. It looks top heavy, as does the Space Shuttle, however it's well balanced, and it moves along slow and perfectly fine on a smooth level surface. From what I can see, the servos work just fine at the slower speed (move slow, start slow, stop slow, and use ramping). A bonus is the added traction to the rubber wheels. I use the standard battery pack and for extended life, use the optional add on battery. For the brain, of course a tether must be used to supply power from an external source. Here the power depends on the clock mode selected.
Details
The project robot has 321 processors in parallel and 1,296 controller ports. There's two Props per board and 20 boards. Boards are PPPBs, Parallax Propeller Proto Boards. The bottom board is the motion control board BOE which uses a BS2 and PBASIC language. The boards above have Propeller processors with SPIN programming.
Arising AI Machine Intelligence
AI self awareness and machine intelligence is a topic that comes up frequently in 2010 as you can see we are constantly moving closer to achieving full machine self awareness. It's not that far away. But it does appear that the machine brain will think differently than the human brain to achieve the same goals. I think great minds can appreciate the self aware concept and welcome it. We are still approaching the full utilization of parallel computing techniques with multi processor chips and multi chip boards, though progress is being made even at the hobby level.
