Investors: Press Release
GeckoSystems Eyeing TI's ARM Processors for Mobile Robot Sensor Fusion
CONYERS, Ga., Sept. 8, 2009 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- GeckoSystems Intl. Corp. (PINKSHEETS: GCKO) announced today that they plan on evaluating Texas Instruments� Luminary Micro products for inclusion in the next generation of the GeckoSPIO™ mobile service robot controller. GeckoSystems is a dynamic leader in the emerging Mobile Service Robot (MSR) industry revolutionizing their development and usage with "Mobile Robot Solutions for Safety, Security and Service™."
"We are excited about the potential performance gains and power saving of switching to Luminary Micro�s family of Cortex-M3 based microcontrollers. Given their extensive selection of microcontrollers I believe it will be possible to replace all of our current 8-bit processors with their far superior 32-bit ARM based chips. This would increase data throughput, enable us to monitor far more sensors and potentially reduce our platform's reaction time. Along with those technical benefits, there would be an increase in code portability, code reuse and allow us to move to industry standard development tools," stated Mark Peele, Vice President of Research and Development, GeckoSystems.
"Texas Instruments is once again demonstrating what makes them a visionary industry leader with the acquisition of Luminary Micro, an innovative company providing the industries first and widest range of Cortex-M3 products. Adoption of this technology could shorten development time of future platforms, help ease the move into high volume production, increase the actionable situational awareness of our MSR�s using our proprietary and internationally recognized sensor fusion technologies and increase ROI for our stockholders," concluded Martin Spencer, President/CEO, GeckoSystems.
According to Wikipedia: "Sensor fusion is the combining of sensory data or data derived from sensory data from disparate sources such that the resulting information is in some sense better than would be possible when these sources were used individually."
Everyday we use "sensor fusion" in our routine activities. For example, we smell smoke and then look for a grayish cloud to determine the source of the smoke, its proximity, and consequent degree of danger to us. In noisy crowds when we talk with someone, we use lip reading to enable us to understand what we don't hear clearly. Humans use sensor fusion every day to make choices based on data that is interdependent, or incomplete, versus using only one of our five senses. The better the sensor fusion, the better the choices and the more "actionable" the "situation awareness" is.
GeckoSystems employs proprietary sensor fusion technologies not only in its flagship automatic self-navigation software, GeckoNav™, but also in GeckoTrak™, the GeckoSPIO™, GeckoOrient™, etc. GeckoTrak uses advanced sensor fusion to merge machine vision, passive infrared, and sonar to identify and/or locate the person of interest such that GeckoTrak can inform GeckoNav automatically as to the whereabouts of the designated person for continuous proximate monitoring.
The GeckoSPIO, a sensor/power input/output mobile robot controller board, enables faster, more graceful self-navigation through loose crowds of moving people as in airport, bus, and train terminals, shopping centers and other public areas. GeckoOrient automatically and intelligently merges sensor data from odometry (dead reckoning), a solid-state compass and accelerometer based gyroscopes (IMU's) for enhanced orientation accuracy while errand running, patrolling, or following a designated person.
The GeckoSPIO has (2) eight-bit CPU's with (8) PWM outputs, (5) eight-bit MCU's, (3) DC to DC power supplies; and over (220) digital, (40) analog to digital, (17) serial and (2) 10/100mhz Ethernet I/O ports.