Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2011 1:12 pm Post subject: New Robobuilder Titan ??
Check out this video - Not the robobuilders in the front - look at the robot in the back top left dancing in time - is it the 1m high robot mentioned at CES. Is it called RQ-Titan ??
Joined: 11 Oct 2004 Posts: 1791 Location: London, UK
Posted: Sat Nov 19, 2011 2:30 pm Post subject:
i'm not able to view the videos. The video has some advert overlay and when pressed it goes to either the video page that has the same advert or to some airline site..
I think its just very slow, The popup appears when its downloading and disappears when you press play. But its take ages - i.e. 5-10 mins to download and then the video is only 8 secs ! Would be good if soemone can transfer to youtube.
It is priced well above DARwIn and NAO (slightly above US 20k) and should include an onboard Windows PC.
It is also suppsoed to include small actuators to make fingers in the hand (similar to the brochures they've posted) and some extra packs are planned such as foot pressure sensors.
Compared to NAO it's really hard to justify the price premium as [EDIT] RQ-TITAN is designed as a much taller Robot; it can compete in Robocup Teen Size AND also Adult size league.
Additionally, Robobuilder is sending over 1 of their engineers free of charge to give training to Universities who buy a pack of these[/EDIT]
NAO Next Gen includes the foot pressure sensors, foot bumpers, sonars, 2 HD webcams and an Atom Z530 along with a Gait Generator and libraries that are more advanced than DarwIn itself:
NAO includes for example Face Recognition, Speech Recognition and Synthesis, Full Body motion so it will bend over or bend back to look down or up going using whole body DoF (opposed to Darwin that will just use 2 DoF for pan & tilt of the head) and notion of it's own body so it won't hit itself when performing motions (if you program it to move the arm from the back to the front it will go around it's own body instead of trying the shortest path and hitting itself).
Anyway NAO is still more expensive than DARwIn though but it's interesting to see that Aldebaran seems to market it for the masses with cute videos.
I had the opportunity to see one in real live and - in its current "incarnation" - is quite impressive from a technical point of view both the Hardware and the Software platform.
Back to RQ-TITAN, details on the software are still unavailable.
One thing that is finally available is their new line of servos. We'll be getting some for evaluating and expect to be selling them in a couple of months if everything goes according to plan.
Regards
Pedro.
Last edited by PedroR on Wed Oct 03, 2012 4:46 pm; edited 1 time in total
I was reviewing the details we've received and they're very similar to what l3v3rz published.
I would just like to add a note about the price which should set (for the western market) in $20k (not more, not less).
It will come as a kit - not pre assembled like DARwIn - and is supposed to include a more powerful embedded PC than DARwIn (2Gb RAM, a faster Atom) and should run Windows with a C SDK (much like DARwIn).
The library is still under development and we've seen some preliminary videos (and we can definitely confirm it is under development)
We're not authorized to disclose the video at this point but it becomes clear that as you increase size on these Robots a number of complexities appear:
The Titan can be 86 cm or 1m tall which means the:
- feet servos and joints are holding a Significant amount of weight
- any backlash (as tiny as it may be) is propagated over a 1m structure and amplified at the top of the structure
This creates quite a challenge, especially when using servos with this technology (DC Motor + Gear set + Electronic Controller).
There are some interesting particularities about this robot though:
1) The mix and match of RS 485 and TTL servos.
2) The hand/fingers (see the Options available on the brochure): they use really small servos to articulate the fingers individually.
They only have 3 fingers but interestingly enough although the human hand has much more DoF our brain and physiology doesn't allow us to control each of our "joints individually.
For example it's hard for us to relax 4 fingers and move just one of them up and down at "full torque" let's say (the exception is our thumb).
On the servo front the news are much more interesting. I will be creating a separate thread to announce these as we're planning to start stocking them.
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