Meet The Bilibot!!!!

The Bilibot Project started at MIT through the exploration of what could be done with the new Kinect sensor. Besides being a great sensor for gesture technology, the Kinect is a powerful robotic sensor - so much so that robotics laboratories at universities across the world are replacing their $5000 sensors with the $150 Kinect! The Bilibot project takes advantage of this new technological breakthrough to provide a research quality robot at a hobby robot's price.

As personal robotics grows we need to both push the boundaries of technology and train future generations of researchers. Our mission is to create a robotics platform for exploration and create a community of robotics enthusiasts.

Bilibot, from the German word 'billig', or cheap, is a sophisticated robotics platform at an affordable price. A Bilibot consists of:
* a powerful computer
* an iRobot create
* a Kinect sensor
* mounting hardware to put it all together
* the ROS Robotic Operating system, with research contributions from roboticists all over the world!

Check out fot the offers of getting this fantastic robot with less price on the Bilibot website.....

Robot Operating System (ROS)

Standford University have came up with a classic operating system called ROS. It started in 2007 & now it has reached to the good level of maturity. It has great support of the various hardware platform. It works on Rovio & Neo too as described in  the only drawback is you should have linux distribution (e.g Fedora, Ubuntu etc..) to work on ROS.

As of 2008, development continues primarily at Willow Garage, a robotics research institute/incubator, with more than twenty institutions collaborating in a federated development model.

ROS provides standard operating system services such as hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management. It is based on a grapharchitecture where processing takes place in nodes that may receive, post and multiplex sensor, control, state, planning, actuator and other messages. The library is geared toward a Unix-like system (Ubuntu Linux is listed as 'supported' while other variants such as Fedora and Mac OS X are considered 'experimental').

ROS has two basic "sides": The operating system side ros as described above and ros-pkg, a suite of user contributed packages (organized into sets called stacks) that implement functionality such as simultaneous localization and mapping, planning, perception, simulation etc.

ROS is released under the terms of the BSD license, and is open source software. It is free for commercial and research use. The ros-pkg contributed packages are licensed under a variety of open source licenses.

For more details check out Wikipedia page or visit ROS website.