Everyone present cried and took lots of pictures:

Yes, that is a diagram of a wee small orb’s first shaky foray into autonomous movement. We are beyond proud over here in the RoBunker, because hell that must have been approximately a ton and a half of hell to make it all go. From Michael Prados, One Of The Lead Swarmies and Possessor of The Will To Orb:

Jon, Niladri, and I coded all day, and then went to the soccer field to sit in the dark and code and debug some more. The culmination of this massive brain exertion is the stumbling attempt at a straight line in the linked jpg [above]. It may not look like much, but for the first time, all the major pieces of orb navigation are working together to autonomously guide the orb along a specified path. We are giving it a way point 20m in front of its initial position, and asking it to go there.

Le Roteur Superieur commemorates this historic moment with un petit pastiche de Seuss:

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!

You have brains in your Orbs.
You have code in your SPU
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the SWARM who’ll decide where to roll.

You’ll look up and down streets. Look ‘em over with care.
About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.”
With your nice IMU and your SPU full of code,
you’re too smart to go down any not-so-good road.

And you may not find any
you’ll want to go down.
In that case, of course,
you’ll head straight out of town.

It’s opener there
in the wide open air.

Out there things can happen
and frequently do
to Orbs who are brainy
and swarmy as you.

And when things start to happen,
don’t worry. Don’t stew.
Just roll right along.
You’ll start happening too.

OH!
THE PLACES YOU’LL ROLL!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 11:28 pm and is filed under Bill Joy Might Be Right, Neat Stuff, Robot Overlords, Sometimes We Deal In Kinetic Art, The Robot Blogs Will Take Over. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.