Three interesting items that could be linked to do
useful things.
I keep wondering how these people expect to POWER
these things, or are they planning to have an atomic
source or perhaps a battery that will require it to
find a source of power to recharge?
How can each of these autonomous units move if all
those wires for power are needed to connect each of
the modules?
ZPE would work perfectly with tiny translators to
extract ambient power to feed all these little
machines, allowing them to combine for whatever
purpose needed.
-------------------------
self-assembling modular robots;
*** the problem is making them all work together
*** as quickly as possible to do useful applications
http://eet.com/story/technology/OEG20000110S0070
Shape-shifting robots that can configure themselves
into a chair, a hammer or a scuttling spider-bot, as
needed, may one day result from work under way at
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Parc).
Xerox' digital machines contain hundreds of individual
components, many of which are computationally active,"
said Yim. "One of the hardest design tasks is
programming these modules, which currently has to be
done differently for every possible configuration."
But the ideal system is not easy to design. For one
thing, said Yim, "the number of possibilities grows
exponentially with the number of modules. The key to
developing these systems into useful machines is in
the programming. Programming the distributed control
of hundreds, thousands or millions of modules, each
with their own processor and limited resources, is
difficult, especially when their actions are tightly
coupled."
---------------------------
*** Robot vision
http://eet.com/story/technology/OEG20000308S0045
The $6 Generic Visual Perception Processor (GVPP) can
automatically detect objects and track their movement
in real-time, according to Bureau d'Etudes Vision
(BEV).
....models the human perceptual process at the hardware
level by mimicking the separate temporal and spatial
functions of the eye-to-brain system. The processor
sees its environment as a stream of histograms
regarding the location and velocity of objects. Those
objects could be the white lines on a highway, the
football in a televised game or the annotated movement
of enemy ground forces from satellite telemetry.
On the software side, a host operating system running
on an external PC communicates with the GVPP's
evaluation board via an OS kernel within the on-chip
microprocessor. BEV dubs the neural-learning
capability of its development environment "programming
by seeing and doing," because of its ease of use.
First, a CMOS imager will be integrated on-chip with
the GVPP, enabling watch-size vision systems by 2002.
After that, Pirim plans to integrate flash memory that
will enable a system the size of a pinky ring by 2004.
And by 2006, Pirim has slated an expanded on-chip DRAM
plus beefed up on-chip processing to solve multisensor
fusion applications in hat-pin-size vision systems.
Application-specific software libraries are also
planned, including optical character recognition, 3-D
analysis and spatial organization.
BEV lists possible applications for the GVPP in
process monitoring, quality control and assembly;
automotive systems such as intelligent air bags that
monitor passenger size and traffic congestion
monitors; pedestrian detection, license plate
recognition, electronic toll collection, automatic
parking management, automatic inspection; and medical
uses including disease identification.
The chip could also prove useful in unmanned air
vehicles, miniature smart weapons, ground
reconnaissance and other military applications, as
well as in security access using facial, iris,
fingerprint, or height and gait identification.
------------------------------
linking many computers together as distributed
processing with Linux at IBM;
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-1580530.html?tag=st.ne.1002.bgif?st.ne.fd.gif.l
TurboLinux and enFuzion for supercomputer emulation;
http://www.turbolinux.com/products/enf/enfuzion.html
=====
=================================
Please respond to jdecker@keelynet.com
as I am writing from my work email of
jwdatwork@yahoo.com.........thanks!
=================================
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger.
http://im.yahoo.com
-------------------------------------------------------------
To leave this list, email <listserver@keelynet.com>
with the body text: leave Interact
list archives and on line subscription forms are at
http://keelynet.com/interact/
-------------------------------------------------------------
