There are now about half a dozen Mini Maxes running around across the United States. As our software development is starting to calm down, I thought I would take a moment to showcase a few of the robot's features.
As you probably have guessed, this robot runs ROS (on a netbook). We're using an ArbotiX to control the arm and neck servos (7 AX-12s total), while the Create base connects directly to the netbook. Two demo buttons are attached through the ArbotiX allowing users to quickly add user input to programs.
http://www.showusyoursensors.com/2011/06/introducing-mini-maxwell.html
Looks like a lot of people were thinking about doing similar thing.. http://www.ros.org/news/2010/12/tutorial-on-adding-a-kinect-to-an-irobot-create.html
The downside of using Intel CPU is power consumption but if the battery life is limited by Roomba, then it might be fine for a beginner's robot since most people are more familar with PC programming environment than embedded processors.
Posted by: Fred | June 28, 2011 at 09:49 PM