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TrackBot
 
Systronix TrackBot - Home Page
TrackBot's unique architecture and penta-function sensor array (patent pending) are designed for collaborative agent (swarm) research as well as general university-level educational use.



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What's New
TrackBot research paper at ACMSE 2010 April
George Rudolph, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, The Citadel, has published a paper to be presented at the April ACMSE 2010 conference.
Sun Oracle SPOT future?

The good news: the SPOT team survived the Oracle takeover and RIF almost intact. SPOT is being revised (to use more readily available components) and will again be manufactured in 2010.
The unknown: well, anything about the future. Such as: will Oracle change the ridiculous Sun commercial license fee for Squawk ($100K and up - that's why you don't see Systronix squawk-based products). Will any commercial users sign up? Will a real developer community ever exist? Where will Oracle take this technology? Your guess is as good as ours (maybe better - if you work for Oracle), but for now at least, SPOT is still alive and seems to be moving forward.

Sun SPOT kit is available for sale
Recently out of stock from other sources, we have a kit for sale. We are not a dealer and won't have more.
Firmware status
2010 March
Due to limited resources we are not currently working on new TrackBot firmware. We have hit some implementation problems in our tachometry firmware so that upgrade is not yet available, and may not be achievable. We'll post more about that here or please post discussions in the TrackBot Google group.
TrackBot at JavaOne 2009
First week in June, San Francisco. TrackBot appeard at the Java.Net pavilion and also in the Swarm of Brian Birds of a Feather presentation: BOF-5369
new Upgrading SunSPOT to final Blue 080827 Recommended for all SPOT users especially those using the eDemo board UART (with TrackBot for example!)
Cool software for simulating and programming robots from Cogmation!
Simulation and code generation. Includes early simulator support for TrackBot. We hope to get the actual code running using Virtualized Intelligence™. It's not quite there yet but we are working on it...
TrackBot Runtime Firmware 008 Update
This is the most tested release yet - literally millions of messages passed between the host and TrackBot. This is a very stable release. We are working on a new release for 2Q 2009, and it isn't going smoothly... Anyway, upgrade to the current release (cheap!) now in the online store: http://www.systronix.com/store/trackbotupdates.html
TrackBot Technical Reference
Free download now in the online store: http://www.systronix.com/store/trackbotupdates.html
TrackBot base board Schematics
Purchase now in the online store: http://www.systronix.com/store/trackbotupdates.html
Video of TrackBot & SunSPOT presentations
Given at the Mobile and Embedded Developer Days 2008 Jan. Very detailed information about SPOT and TrackBot from the designers themselves.
New TrackBot V2 code video at YouTube
Check out improved sensor use as TrackBot tries to escape from a pen
Robotics community at java.net
The robotics community has numerous active projects including several for TrackBot. Recent commits include demo code for RoboDev and IROS. Links to those conferences and code are at the java.net robotics project page.
RoboSim contest
The RoboSim contest is technically over - but you still need this as part of the JavaOne RoboHACC "un-contest" - get all the information on the java.net RoboSim contest website. Use Java to control simulated TrackBots in the Greenfoot 2D world. Plus feel free to use this code for your own JUG or educational purposes. All of the code is free and open source.

Lots of JavaOne week TrackBot action - 2008 May
RoboHACC un-contest
RoboHACC is Robotic Hardware Arena Collaborative Coding, and that's what happened all week in the Java.net Community Corner in the Pavilion at JavaOne. All of the code is free and open source. Details at the site: https://robohaccontest.dev.java.net/
CommunityOne Day
TrackBot and its educational uses, with a live demo were presented by Bruce Boyes and Gary Thompson. Details on the appearances page: http://www.systronix.com/appearances.html
JavaOne BOF-6620
Wed May 07 at 20:30 at JavaOne. About 100 people came to see the Sonar/PIR plug on sensor module prototype in action as TrackBot attempted to detect a warm body and fire foam disks at it.

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Java and all Java-based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries.
TrackBot, Robot Area Network, Digital Reflexes, JStamp, TStik, JCX and JSimm are trademarks of Systronix, Inc.