May 29, 2014
Intel showed off its fully customizable, 3-D printable robot kit Jimmy at the Code Conference Wednesday. Intel says it plans to bring Jimmy to market by the end of the year, with a price starting around $1,600.
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Intel's futurist Brian David Johnson debut 3D printed robot Jimmy at the Maker Faire in New York last year. According to Johnson, Intel started the project around ten years ago. Imagine if you could create your own robot. What would it look like? What would it do? This robot project aims to 'let anyone create robots, and change them and share them in online communities, enabling them to be 3D printed with varying designs."
"Using 3D printing, using open source hardware and software... anyone can build a robot that is completely open source, where the design files are free and the AI is open and anyone can start writing apps for the robot."
Intel will offer schematics and AI code free online so that people can 3D print their own. The kit includes everything that can't be printed, like motors, wires, battery, processor etc and will be buyable online at 21stCenturyRobot.com.
The consumer model is cheap because it runs on Intel Edison, a cheap computer on a chip, according to Re/Code. If it were equipped with an Intel Core i5 processor, it would cost more like $16,000. Intel hopes that eventually that consumers will be able to build custom robots for less than $1,000 within the next five years.
Also the robot will be open source, so users could personalize for their own purposes. Developers can also build programs and apps, making robotics accessible and fun. Robots will be able to walk, talk, dance and do things like tweeting, translating languages or even delivering cold beer.
Johnson explains that it is no different than a smartphone with customizable apps. "It's like a smartphone with legs," he said. "Your robot will be completely different from mine; you customize it and program the artificial intelligence, not by having a PhD in robotics, but by downloading apps."
The company eventually plans to offer other robot kits, an app marketplace at 21stCenturyRobot.com.
"What's so exciting about the open source model is the public gets involved in developing this first generation of crowd-sourced, consumer robots. We all get a say in what they do, and together we will come up with far more ideas, more innovation, and more creativity," said Johnson.
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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Sounds as bullshit - at very beginning of Jimmy Ads campaign it was promised the price about $500. Acceptable, comparing with $350 Lego Mindstorm, because the great advantage of Jimmy vs. Mindstorm is the fact of "printability" of its parts. It's really impossible to print out Lego parts (especially gears) on budget 3D printers because of many technological limitations of Filament-based 3D printers. Development of Talmudo-Voodoo project may give us some chance to simplify the process of 3D design & sub-dividing the parts onto printable sub-parts, 3D assembly of that parts and, finally, simulation of the motion of such assemblies with dynamic 3D constraints, anyway...
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