Trade.Information

Product Name: OCT-1c

Product Description

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.

Company Details

ALife has recently caught the attention of a wide range of researchers as a new way to look at phenomena associated with life and offers a new way of looking at intelligent systems. Evolutionary Systems research has already become a national level... more