Not to be confused with Tyrannosaurus the king of beasts, REX is a complete development platform for sophisticated robotic applications. While most robotic designers use the Arduino platform as a base for their robots, Mike Lewis and Kartik Tiwari were not impressed with the available hardware. Their design, REX, is specifically targeted towards robots. REX poses no wiring hassles, has built-in battery inputs and has a robot programming environment that it boots up directly into.
The duo felt people who designed robots needed a new and more advanced platform. When using a single microcontroller for handling multiple sensors, motors and other electronics, problems start arising. The situation worsens as you plan on adding increasingly sophisticated tasks such as speech recognition and computer vision. The Arduino is, by default, not a multitasking platform and is intended for running a single task at a time. However, robotics essentially requires multiple tasks to be running at any given time.
Therefore, REX came up with a 32-bit ARM Cortex-A8 processor core running at 1GHz, an 800 MHz DSP core and 512 MB of RAM. The board runs on the Alphalem Operating System and boasts of a host of features such as built-in drivers for sensors and other similar devices, a task manager to allow launching multiple processes and support for several programming languages such as C, C++ and Python. The Arduino-style programming environment facilitates developing your own robot applications.
REX is a low-cost robot development platform that targets advanced robotics. Although simple robotics can be handled by the Arduino project and is fairly straightforward, REX is geared towards handling the extra functionality required where you need voice recognition and computer vision. Being simple and low-cost, the REX platform helps make more advanced robotics projects more accessible to the average hobby roboticist.
At the core of REX is the ADE or Alphalem Development Environment, consisting of scripts or programs written in C++, which form an Application Programming Interface for communicating with devices connected to REX using the I2C expansion ports. Apart from the built-in drivers that the Alphalem team selected for REX for driving sensors and actuators, the ADE also has a process management system for running multiple programs in parallel for efficient robot control. This, the team claims is the most useful features that REX offers to robotic designers.
Physically, REX is about the size of a standard pack of playing cards, small and compact. This palm-sized, single board computer is priced at $99 for its basic model, which includes the DSP, camera, microphone inputs and preloaded OS. You can use REX to control small simple robots easily.
However, this is not to mean that REX cannot handle complicated stuff. In fact, REX is extremely powerful and is able to handle a huge range of sensors such as speech recognition and machine vision. This allows it to be used for some very complicated robotic activities.
Incidentally, the name for the project was earlier AlphaOne, to commemorate Apple’s first PC. However, Mike, as the product engineer, proposed that the name should be changed to REX since he had a Jurassic Park mug on his desk.
