U. of Arizona student builds Ubuntu-Atom powered spider-bot

Matt Bunting, a electrical engineering student at the University of Arizona, has been attracting some attention with his latest creation: a six-legged robot that he built for a class on cognitive robotics.

The spider-bot, or hexapod as it is more properly known, is powered by a fairly low-cost, off-the-shelf 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, running on a US15W chipset. The software runs off of a Ubuntu Linux OS.

The most significant feature that Matt's yet-unnamed robot creation has is an adaptive capacity to walk. The robot has a inexpensive webcam-eye on the front of it, and it uses it for receiving visual feedback on its movement. Effectively the robot figures out its movement by seeing what it is doing -- not by going through pre-programmed movements.

"One of the things I wanted to explore was the idea of reinforcement learning. What I wanted to do was not preprogram any of those walking algorithms, I wanted it to figure out how to walk straight forward on its own," Matt was quoted as saying. "It has the ability to figure it out itself."

Matt's prof was impressed with his work: "I see that this device might be doing scientific work like autonomous navigation, mapping of different environments, moving over rough terrain and doing exploration, possibly planetary exploration...I think Matt's robot has a lot of possibilities. It's really not so far-fetched that a robot like this could go to Mars."

Even folks at Intel heard of Matt's robot. And after a seeing video of it in action, they decided to order two from him to use as promotional robots for the Atom processor.

With Matt's talents, no doubt he has the potential of a bright career to look forward to. Already CrustCrawler Robotics -- the makers of the servo motors he used in the hexapod -- have contracted him to make some software that customers can use to get their very own spider-bots walking about.