Robotic building block foundation of business for UCD alumnus, mentor
It doesn’t look flashy, but with their brick-shaped robot, Graham Ryland and Harry Cheng believe they’ve created a tool researchers and teachers can make dazzling.
“You see these walking robots and they look really complex and really cool, but the only thing they can do is walk and typically it’s just straight,” Ryland said during a demonstration Thursday in the Kemper Hall lobby at UC Davis. “What we wanted to provide is the building blocks, a new paradigm for developing robots. I think the sky is the limit for this.”
Cheng is a UCD professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering; Ryland an alumnus who studied in Cheng’s Integration Engineering Laboratory.
Together, they’ve developed their “iMobot” and co-founded a company, Barobo Inc., to bring it to market. The university has filed a patent for the robot.
Each iMobot module features two joints at its center and wheels on each end, allowing four degrees of freedom. A module can crawl like an inchworm, move on its wheels, even raise one end up to form a camera stand.
The three-pound prototype’s guts are an on-board computer with a 400 megahertz Linux operating system, a battery and a motor. Along its exterior are generic, poker chip-sized connectors onto which anything from a gripper arm to a microphone can be attached, along with a wide array of sensors.
Modules can be linked together to create a snake that can move through rough terrain. It can be formed into a sort of truck that can roll along smooth surfaces. Or it can take on any of countless other shapes researchers can dream up.
When connected, all modules talk both to each other and any sensors attached to them. They can even self-assemble. A simple hand-held device, like a PDA with wireless connectivity, can be used to control them as a group or individually.
The National Science Foundation boosted the effort to bring iMobot to market by early 2012 with a $150,000 business innovation grant. That grant also qualifies Barobo to compete for $500,000 in additional funding.
Ryland, who is Barobo’s president, said the company is eying two markets.
“The first is university researchers who, until this point, have been developing things on Lego Mindstorm. You would not believe how many Ph.D. students there are doing dissertations with Legos,” he said.
“Or they build (their robots) themselves. Not every lab has the mechanical aptitude to make a robot from scratch, however. So what we’re providing is a mechanical platform that’s open. It runs Linux, an open computer operating system, allowing researchers to develop their own software and also their own sensors that can port into the robot.”
Added Cheng, “Artificial intelligence, robot coordination, mobile networking — all that research can be done on this platform.”
Along with its uses as a teaching and research tool, the their robot provides a fast, cheap way to design industrial robotic system, the partners believe. If any one module breaks, it can quickly be replaced with a new one.
A second target market: Those who design industrial robotic systems, for whom the iMobot will be a faster, cheaper way to test out assembly lines and other uses, the partners believe.
“If you look at other modular robots, each one has only one degree of freedom or two. Maybe it can crawl forward and back or it can’t turn. You have to connect three or in some cases five (modules) to actually do anything,” Ryland said. “At UC Davis, our goal was to create a robot that was as mobile as possible in as simple a shape as possible.
“It can drive, it can arch to give itself more surface clearance, it can lift itself up and go end-over-end. That’s a great deal of mobility for such a simple shape.”
Barobo is seeking research partners who will act as early adopters before raising venture capital. Meanwhile, graduate and undergraduate students in Cheng’s lab are working to develop new, higher-level functions for the robot.
David Ko, a Ph.D. student from Fremont, is writing code that will better allow the modules to communicate and work in groups, for example. Kevin Gucwa, a Ph.D. student from Connecticut, is creating virtual models that will allow iMobot to “think” better — to recognize new obstacles, for example, and puzzle out how to move by them.
Meanwhile, Barobo’s five employees have focused on iMobot’s mechanical parts and reliability. The company has settled in West Sacramento rather than Davis because cheaper space was available there, Ryland said.
Cheng’s lab has toiled in robotics and information technology for more than two decades. Working with a former student to bring a product to market is a new experience for the professor.
“I’ve published more than 160 papers. So one or two more papers, that’s not very exciting for me,” Cheng said. “But working with a student to bring the technology to the marketplace is very fulfilling. I think it can impact many other researchers and their students. That has a broader impact to society.”
— Reach Cory Golden at cgolden@davisenterprise.net or (530) 747-8046.
Short URL: http://www.davisenterprise.com/?p=24916
Posted by Cory Golden
on Mar 24 2011.
Last Login: Wed 16 May 2012 11:14:07 AM PDT
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