Tim from VIA and www.mobilerobotics.org here reporting in to let you guys know that WindowsforDevices.com has a great feature on a hacked RoboSapien with a Camera/PocketPC head.

Check it out here.

Deskoid Robotic PC System is a techno tower of Babel

In my capacity as VIA Robotics Program Manager one of the major ideas we are trying to convince the robotic community of is the need for x86 architecture. We have a vested interest in this idea of course but also we believe the standards, connectivity options, processing power and pricing are right for the robotics industry. Because VIA's design principals also include small, fanless, low power drawing properties, we believe we have the edge over other x86 solution providers.

While there are many different robotic design and concept possibilities that can be based around x86 architecture one of the interesting categories that is slowly emerging is that of the PC-Bots. While many robots are designed to do a particular task, PC-Bots do what you PC does and then extend its functionality by adding a few robotic touches. White Box Robotics 912 series of robots due out later this year, are a perfect example. RoboDynamics will likely be coming out this year with a Robotic Personal Assistant that is also based around a PC platform.

Wayne Chiang has given the PC-Bot concept a lot of thought and has come up with his own unique approach developing what he calls a Deskoid Robotic PC, which marries the PC, robotics and the desk itself to create a useful, multifunctional tool that he feels may introduce the furniture industry into robotics. The Deskoid Robotic PC would take advantage of several well developed PC based technologies such as web cams, VOIP (Skype for instance) to further enhance its functionality. The Deskoid Robotics PC would be used for remote security monitoring, long distance eLearning, AV-appliance integration, mobile videoconferencing or even robotic photography.

The Deskoid Robotics PC has its own blog/website that is an illustrated guide through the design and conceptualization process of this truly unique PC-Bot.

A briefer Chinese version of the website can be found here.

www.mobilerobotics. org We have now become media sponsors for The Prodigies a DARPA Grand Challenge team, and also the upcoming Robonexus event in October.

I haven't posted a diary entry for a while and a lot has happened regarding robotics.

1. Firstly there has been a slight delay in the release of the VIA Nano-ITX boards to the general population. It looks like its going to be a couple more months. Nano-ITX Press Release

2. I'm quite proud of the fact that Popular Science Magazine has listed me on their website as the robotics advisor for their "Geek Chorus". Always loved that magazine as a kid (and now!) Geek Chorus

3. www. mobilerobotics.org audience has grown quite large thanks to the robotics enthusiasts like yourself.

4. I'm writing an article for Servo magazine (should be in next, next months issue).

I like your attitude Poo!

If everyone thought like that life would be much easier. But its only natural for most of our customers to want the latest greatest... NOW!

More good news is that the power control for this board will be even greater and depending on the CPU skew you will be able to get your total CPU chipset power draw down to 5W.

Regarding Nano-ITX... its a good news bad news thing.

Yes it was officially launched at CeBIT, Yes they are now in production. Yes the specs should be up... and that's the good news.

The bad news is that there is significant demand from VIA's existing customers and some very key strategic potential customers. So... the first few batches will be going to those people and it will probably be a few more months (sorry) before they start to find their way into channels for the individual consumer.

Yo! Swirling fella!

Where does it list the new price of Robosapien? Is it no longer US$100?

Tim

Kunal great to hear!

If any of you are in the Boston area in March make sure you check out the Robotics Trends "Emerging Robotics Technologies $ Applications Conference". There is a huge push on right now to create commercial opportunities in the personal and service robotics space and this is where you will have a chance to see what's hot and who's making a play in this space.

VIA will be presenting and you can find out more about what our strategy is for helping grow the market.

Details here: http://www.roboticsevents.com/

Kunal,

Don't know what your email address is... but you might consider a VIA EPIA M10000 Mini-ITX board with an embedded 1GHz VIA C3 processor. Price is reasonalble, size is great and power draw is less.

Is that enough processing power for you? I understand some of our customers are doing vision recognition on these boards.

You can check out VIA's robot related info here:

http://www.via.com.tw/en/robotics/robotics.jsp

Hope that helps.

Tim VIA

Dafydd Walters has a new how to build PC-Based robots column called "Mr. Davbot's Musing's". The column is published on the www.mobilerobotics.org website.