Robotic Nation Evidence

From a press release:

Gumstix, inc., maker of the world’s smallest full function miniature computers (FFMC), today announced its robostix™ board, the company’s first expansion board specifically designed for robotics.

"The new robostix board meets so many of our design goals, and perhaps dreams,” said Professor Richard Vaughan of the Autonomy (Robotics) Lab in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University (SFU) near Vancouver, Canada, “The overall robotics solution from gumstix gives us complete freedom of movement and an efficient design at such a low cost. We will be using the gumstix in our design and testing of forty robots working together”.

The Autonomy Lab at SFU has standardized on the gumstix connex platform, robostix and cfstix (for WiFi). “These gumstix products have reduced the size, power consumption and student programming time while increasing the robot’s mobility and our control,” continued Professor Vaughan. “Additionally, we are able to use, and make available to everyone, our existing Player software on the gumstix”. Player is an open-source project for robotics interfacing.

In addition to signals from the gumstix motherboard, the robostix expansion board exposes 6 PWM Channels (2x8 bit, 6 programmable), 8 A/D, 24 GPIO, 2 UART at logic levels and an insystem programming port.