Intel Boss Controls Robot Spider Army - With A Curie
Written by Lucy Black   
Sunday, 12 April 2015

Intel is getting better at PR. At the recent Intel Developer Forum, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich took to the stage to demo its latest system-on-a-chip controlling an army of spiderbots.

OK it wasn't an army it was just four but it could have been. 

The Curie, announced back in January, might be Intel's best chance of getting more than a foothold in the IoT market. It is tiny button-like device that has a complete Intel Quark SoC and some sensors built in.

It might be small, but it has 384K of Flash and 80K of SRAM to run the open source RTOS operating system. What is remarkable is that it also crams in  Bluetooth LE, DSP hub and 6-axis accelerometer and gyro. 

 

curie

 

The intention is that this could be used in wearable devices, but it is obvious that it has applications that go well beyond this. The Curie formed the main part of the demonstration. A small wristband containing a Curie monitored Krzanich's arm position and gestures and connected via Bluetooth to four spiderbots. 

It all sounds innocent enough, but watch what happens:

 

Spooky isn't it?!

spiderbot1

 

In case you missed them, the spiderbots aren't new. They were on show at CES earlier in the year and, even without the Curie controller, they are cute:

 

 

What is it with Intel and spiders? To show off its Edison processor Intel helped create a spider dress that reacted to protect the wearer's personal space if someone came to close, see Spider Dress Defends Your Space.

Now it has a bunch of spiders under the CEO's personal command. Perhaps this is how they plan to finish off ARM and any other competitors. 

The wristband containing the Curie is claimed to be able to detect a range of gestures and what its wearer is doing. Couple this to Intel's RealSense depth camera and there is no telling where it all leads. 

spiderbot2b

Banner


Edgeless Systems Announces Continuum AI
14/03/2024

Edgeless Systems has announced the launch of Continuum, a  security solution that provides cloud-based "Confidential AI" services and enables sharing of sensitive data with chatbots such as ChatG [ ... ]



CSS Test of Time Award 2023
18/02/2024

The ACM CCS Test-of-Time Award honors research with long-lasting influence, which have had significant impacts on systems security and privacy. The 2023 award in respect of a paper by Marten van Dijk  [ ... ]


More News

 

raspberry pi books

 

Comments




or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

Last Updated ( Sunday, 12 April 2015 )