The original OCT-1 robot was developed for a university museum as an educational demonstration of
"a day in the life of a spiny lobster, panulirus japonicus." The development of this robot was
supervised by an animal ethologist specializing in ocean animals. In that application, using the highly
effective behavior-based software composed of simple agents made up of a sensor-action pair run on
a powerful on-board processor, the robot lobsters autonomously look for infrared "food" sources while
avoiding obstacles such as walls, "other lobsters", obstacles on the "ocean floor", and an ultrasonic
signal emitting "octopus" - the lobster's predator. The robot lobster would learn to adjust its steps to
clear bumps found on the simulated ocean floor. The new version (OCT-1c) has been developed as a
result of a succession of revisions (OCT-1, OCT-1a, OCT-1b) for improved durability, reliability and
longer experimental runs for various biorobotic, animat, behavioral, and ethological research. It is
approximately 1kg lighter than OCT-1, and the leg motors have about 30% more torque. The robot is
currently being used at a number of leading research institutions throughout the world for its superb
power-weight ratio, on-board computational power, and durability. These users include École
Normale Superieure, Paris; Sussex University; Tokyo Institute of Technology; Scuola Superiore
Sant'Anna, Italy; Tokai University; and the University of Technology, Malaysia. OCT-1c is primarily
used for walking robot research and experiments including study on gait development and co-ordination,
learning in robot behavior, and research on Evolutionary Robotics.
|
Processor:
|
Motorola 68332 (Motorola 68000 family microcontroller)
|
|
On-board Memory:
|
RAM: 1MByte
ROM: 64KByte
|
|
Sensors:
|
15 light sensors
8 active infrared sensors
5 whiskers: 2 at front, 2 on side, and 1 at back
|
|
Serial ports:
|
RS232 level 1
TTL level 2
|
|
User-ports:
|
8 digital outputs
6 digital inputs
8 analog inputs
|
|
Power:
|
Two Ni-Cd batteries (4.8V each) for motors and computers
|
|
Run Time:
|
Motor: 40 minutes of continuous operation per charge
Computer: 90 minutes of continuous operation per charge
|
|
Size:
|
width: 35 cm (14 inches)
length: 60 cm (24 inches)
height: 18 cm (7 inches) (fully standing up)
|
|
Weight:
|
3.45 kg including batteries
|
|
Top Speed:
|
15 cm/second
|
|
Actuators:
|
2 servo-motors on each of 8 legs (total of 16 motors) for both forward-backward and up-down leg
movement. The total dof of the robot is 16.
|
Video Clip - multiple OCT robots
Windows Media Player (553 KB)
|
Hardware options
- Compound eye system
- Articulation system for the compound eye system
- People following/people avoidance sensor set
- Miniature video camera/transmitter/receiver
- Extra light sensor assembly
- Voice recognition/synthesis module
Software options
- Compound eye input processing system
- Control software for articulated systems for compound eye system
- People following/avoidance software
- Light source following/avoidance software
- Basic pseudo command vocabulary for the speech recognition unit
|
© 2008, AAI Canada, Inc.
112 John Cavanaugh Drive, Ottawa,
Ontario, Canada K0A 1L0
TEL: +1.613.839.6161 or 1.800.895.1122 ; FAX: +1.613.836.5567
AAI Canada, Inc. provides this information as an informational tool to the public,
and is not responsible for any errors in content. All information should be verified by the reader.
General Inquiries: Contact Us
Technical Inquiries: Webmaster
|
|
