@MovieMaker, By gosh I think I have that book you mentioned. Purchased it at a flea market a few years back but never took the time to read it properly I guess. I will have to look for it this evening. I do have the "Build your own working Robot" It was my first robot building book. I am still using ideas from it.

@Rich, Yeah... maybe holding off till Revolution is released will be a good idea. It may open up a whole new concept for us to use. I hope @Toymaker will be able to (and have the time to) teach us how to utilize the "Volume Occupancy Mapping" idea.

@Rex, Tony's (toymaker) has explained it well enough so once I have understood the logic it shouldn't be too difficult a task to put it in place somehow. The main issue is working out the X,Y coordinates of the robot and it's direction. If those details are known and sensor reading accurate a map can be made easily. But it does all come back to the robot position and direction as far as I can see.

I think the subject for this thread needs changing, it's far from "For Rich" now, or more to the point, I'm sure I'm not the only one who can help here

Rich, I tried to change the title but,it would not let me. sorry.

blush

@rgordon, The EZ-B (which is a great robot controller), was never designed really to link with encoders and most of the hackable toys do not have encoders anyway (Bigtrak being the exception but with lower resolution encoders).

Volume occupancy mapping is a great way to get a robot to find a docking charger, and for general autonomous navigation, but as I said earlier you need really good (and accurate) odometry. For this on our EZ1 (development robot) and EZ:2 (production robot), we are developing a custom locomotion drive controller based on a PIC microcontroller that will handle all the encoder operations and motor control for the EZ-B via an I2C link. These new robots will also have a second PIC for all the head electronics/mechanics so again this will take a lot of mundane operations away from the EZ-B and both these microcontrollers will also greatly reduce the I/O overhead on the EZ-B itself. At some point in the future when our EZ robots are fully developed and ready for retail we will make available these sub-boards so EZ-B users will be able to add these functions to their own robots. DJ has said he will support this new EZ-B based robot range and even produce custom controls, we are really pleased to be working with the EZ-Robot team.

@moviemaker, yes I had all those books to, with the Rodney and Buster robots! I have had some involvement with a number of robotic publications/books. The great robotic hobbyist author Gordon McComb credited me as "Tony Ellis a real life Q if I ever meet one" when I assisted on his (still brilliant) book "The Robot Builders Bonanza", I can really recommend this book.

I have all of those books and I built the Rodney robot. I LOVE Blankenship's program in figure 16-4. It has A.I. really built into it. Too bad it is only Basic. That is really a powerful amount of code.

Hi Moviemaker, thats really neat to hear from someone that actually made a Rodney robot! I would really like to hear how it went and did you take it to Gamma class intelligence? Do you still have the robot or any pictures.

I did everything Exactly How David Heiserman said. I was about 90% complete. Several of my buddies told me that it would not work as directed in the book. So, I called up David Heiserman and asked him. I think he told me that it would not work but I could purchase a factory made one that would work. It was a Rodney package that was fancied up. So, at that time, I purchased two RB5-X robots. One had an arm and the other did not. All they did was go around and run into things and say "Excuse me!" and navigate around things. They were cool looking , but nothing special. The same was for my Hero1 robot, nothing special. My Novag by Gavon chess playing robot played a good game of chess, but that was all. I have tried to get the robots to demonstrate gamma activity, but it sees it only works in theory. It SHOULD work. It all makes sense. But, I haven't seen it. Andy at Parallax built a Boe-bot that had the Gamma software installed. It was in ASM language. Several weeks were spent on the experiments but, the robot did not show many signs of A.I. I recently bought a QBO robot only to be disappointed in it. You have to program it in C++ and Python or it won't do anything. All of the things in the demo videos are not included in the purchase. It has potential, but you almost have to have a Doctorate in Computer Science in order to do anything with it. There were only two robots in my past that has been close. One was the Leaf project and the other the EZ-B which does rings around the Qbo.

It has been very depressing. I was hoping to see Singularity before I died. But, it looks like it is very very far away.

There was some work in Sweden that was centered around evolution in robots and that work turned out pretty well. Robots evolved and did some pretty neat stuff. I had gotten out of robotics for 12 years to let the computers catch up and be fast enough to do something useful. But, they are STILL not as fast as I would like them. Intel has 100 core cpus out there, but they won't release them.

The EZ-B has been the ONLY platform that has come up with anything close to doing MOST of the things I want done.

I guess I will get off of my soapbox now.

Cheers!

@moviemaker I am sorry to hear that Ai experiences have been dissapointing for you, but it seems you have owned some increadible robots!

I hope that maybe I will be able to help you at some point as we are looking at using our Ai core with the EZ1 and EZ:2 robots and as you like the EZ-B, then this could mean that you get to use our Ai in your own robots.

With me the Ai bug started in 1969 when I first saw 2001 a Space Odyssey, from then onward I was determined to make an Ai like HAL9000, and its taken me 40 years to produce a self learning Ai and there is still much work to do! There is a lot of info on our Ai (and robots) in the July/August 2011 edition of Robot magazine, if you interested I can send you a copy of the article?

A great friend of mine is Guile Lindroth Filho from Guile 3D who you probably know produced the Ai Denise he and his team have done some amazing work on virtual humans!

As I said I have studied Ai for over 40 years, but I do not think we will see the singularity in the next 20 years, but I am pretty sure it may happen maybe within 30 years.