EZ-AI development is on hold right now, well kind of...

We are in the process of working with some services that will allow the capabilities of EZ-AI to be far better than what they currently are. These include Wolfram|Alpha and IBM BlueMix/Watson. Speech Recognition will be performed through Nuance Cloud services. Advanced vision features will be available through OpenCV. A quick search of these services will allow you to see the end goal of what we are doing. These will be in the Rafiki project which is the primary focus at this time for CochranRobotics. We will release a limited use version for free which will replace EZ-AI. All of the current features of the EZ-AI database will be available through the new version. All of the services provided by EZ-AI will be available through REST queries and exposed services. This will allow plugins to ARC to be able to use these services.

There has been a huge amount of changes to what is possible since I first started working on EZ-AI. This huge shift of improved technologies has made it necessary to rework EZ-AI so that it can continue to grow and mature.

We are also toying with the idea of allowing programmers to write their own business logic layer within Rafiki. This would allow a programmer to be able to use the core services of Rafiki/EZ-AI and write their own applications with the data that is returned. It will probably be a while before this is implemented, but it is something that we are trying to make happen.

I have probably said too much, but wanted to give you all a picture of what is happening and why EZ-AI isn't being worked on directly. We hope to have our new AI available around the end of the year. There are multiple developers working on this while I find come up with solutions to other problems that arise.

As far as Rafiki goes, the pods are functioning great and additional code/abilities are being added almost daily. The models for the pods are being tweaked to expose the HDMI and usb ports and network port to the outside of the case. This will allow someone to connect a mouse, keyboard and monitor to the pod and use it as a computer if they would like. The Rafiki Bot is about 1/3 of the way printed. I am making modifications to the models as needed and reprinting some of the parts as needed. There will be 6 subsystems on this robot. 3 of these subsystems have been written and are ready to use. The other 3 subsystems cant be worked on until more of the Rafiki Bot has been printed. The 3 that are not complete are all very similar for motor control. I hope to have these ready in a couple of weeks. I should be able to show a demo of the Rafiki Bot in about a month, and then all of the robot programming starts. I will work on the charger base shortly after the robot has been completed and the pods are all working with all of their functionality.

One more thing on EZ-AI... As a part of this rewrite, you will just need to have Java installed on your computer to install and use EZ-AI. The days of the huge install will be behind us so it should make it far better in the long run. The other thing that this allows is robot platform independence. I will be working on modules in ARC to allow the features of EZ-AI to be accessible far more easily. This will probably not be worked on until December at the earliest.

Okay, going back to my robot cave. Have a great day all.