While I used the Lynxmotion
Johnny 5 kit as a platform for my
project, the principles, concepts, and
even components of this project can
be applied to almost any robotics
project. This is especially true of
this article, as the rapidly shrinking
size of ITX-based motherboards and
CPUs prove to be perfect controllers
for today’s robotics projects.
Welcome to the World
of PC-based Robotics
At first glance, some people
might think that only larger robots
are capable of housing a fully
unctioning onboard PC. The ITX platform proves this is a
misconception, as complete PC solutions can be as small as
the size of a pack of cigarettes and will soon be smaller
than a business card. Depending upon the size of your
robot, you can choose from the Mini-ITX ( 17 x 17 cm), the
Nano-ITX ( 12 x 12 cm), the Pico-ITX ( 10 x 7.2 cm), and the
soon to be released Mobile-ITX ( 7. 5 x 4. 5 cm). Figure 1
shows the different models of the
ITX motherboard CPUs and a
comparison of their sizes. While
these computers are quite small,
they pack more than enough
horsepower for any modern
robotics application, as well as a
wealth of features at your disposal.
As my Johnny 5 platform is
a bit on the small-to-medium side
for rovers, I chose the VIA EPIA
PX10000G Pico-ITX platform to
conserve space and power
consumption. This motherboard
CPU packs a ton of features given
how tiny it is, boasting a 1 GHz
VIA C7 processor, 1 GB of DDR2
RAM, SATA, IDE, USB 2.0, sound, video, and Ethernet.
You might be wondering why you would need that kind of
processing power and features on a personal robot, when
many times a small microcontroller does the job just fine.
First of all, because you can. Given that these computers
are getting so small and low in power consumption, even
if you won’t use that much power to begin with you’re
raising the ceiling almost limitlessly for future
expansion. Besides, how cool is it to be able to boast
that your robot runs Windows or Linux? Furthermore,
it allows one to run Microsoft’s Robotic Studio locally
on the robot, which has a growing development
community and a wealth of robust features.
Second, it opens up possibilities for your robot that
are usually out of the reach of even the most modern
microcontrollers. An onboard PC means you can have
vision processing, networking, data logging, speech
output and recognition, USB host, multiple com ports,
LCD display, and remote telepresence capabilities all
Part 2: PC-based Robotics
In this series of articles, we will explore
my Pico-ITX based Johnny 5 project.
In the first article, I detailed the work
that went into upgrading and expanding
the original kit to make it a more viable
research platform. In this article, I will dive
into the concept and implementation of
PC-based robotics. Not only will we
show how easy an onboard PC is to
integrate, but we will begin to explore
the many advantages of having that
much horsepower locally on your robot.
FIGURE 1
52 SERVO 10.2008
