Now I have the EZ-B kit and the Hearoid it's time to start my Showcase thread.
I still haven't decided on a name for him yet, all suggestions are welcome.
I won this robot on ebay weeks ago, for the past 2 weeks he has been waiting for me to collect him...
Today was the day, a road trip to pick him up and bring him back to his new home...
In his new home (with Omnibot and Wall-e in the background totally unaware they are next in line to be opened up)
It wasn't long before this happened...
Now waiting to go in the dishwasher to get nice and clean.
The plan is to make him autonomous, running 24/7 (except for when he knows to go charge himself up) but will also be adding in the various image tracking options.
The only other slight modifications to be made to him are to convert the head to tilt & pan which will involve having to give him a small neck.
The head will include the camera. I haven't yet decided to fit it in one of his eyes or to make it his nose. The issue to overcome with this is the blue tint on the bubble head. The mouth will have a light or some lights in which flicker when he speaks.
The arms will be given some life with servos at the shoulder joints and the elbows provided I can get them to fit in there nicely.
Ultrasonic sensor will be in his chest, probably on a servo to give a wider view.
Original drive wheels and gearbox seem to be in very good shape so will plan to reuse those and just replace the existing motors for the modified servos if they can manage the task.
Speaker and microphone will be in the original positions - if it's not broke why fix it?
Not too big a project but enough to give me a test, help me learn and bring an old robot back to life.
Other robots from Synthiam community
Cardboardhacker's Rover Ad
DJ's Self Docking Robot
Great lets build robots and talk only about about robots and keep other info that not about robots off this forum PLEASE thats all i ask
Haven't had time to work on the arm tonight since I had some urgent work come in and I couldn't say no to it, but while doing that I did grab a bunch more images of the arm in it's current state from a few different angles.
I like the drawings Rich. How long did they take?
To be honest I haven't a clue how long they took, I've been tinkering with them between jobs. I'd guess a couple of hours which includes the time taken to find and measure the original Hearoid/Omnibot parts.
I've downloaded Google Sketchup but I have spent the time to learn it. It also has the physics add on that's interesting.
Personally I prefer AutoDesk 123D over Google Sketchup. It's more of a resource hog but it more than makes up for that with it's features and simplicity. Once the basics are drawn up I will be taking it in to AutoDesk Inventor and AutoCAD to tweak it all a bit more and fine tune the minor details.
OK so barely any work done on Melvin lately (again) but I did spend a bit of time today working on his emotions.
Yep, I plan to give him full blown emotions and behavioural modifications to suit. They said robots don't have feelings, they were wrong
Basically, what happens is, whenever I do anything or Melvin does anything it alters his variables for happiness, anger, shyness and panic (I want to add more but my mind went blank - suggestions more than welcome). I've not done this through a billion lines of extra script in each task/script/activity but decided to use what I refer to as flags.
For instance, if I say "Melvin, let's play hide and seek", he will continue to run his hide & seek script as he always did, the only change that I needed to make to the existing script was one line. At the end of the script, in this case when face detection triggers that I found him or he found me there is 1 new line...
Or something similar depending on what happened. This is to make it so that anyone can add it to an existing project with the greatest of ease.
In the AI/emotion script there is a loop which checks for these flags being 1. If they are then it runs the required code to increase or decrease the different levels.
These levels are also monitored by a constant loop in another script. When certain conditions are met it throws him into different "modes" or more like moods. Depending on these moods will alter how willing he is to do what I ask him, what activities he does by himself and even the phrases used in responses. Just like a human.
I plan to bring his "energy" (battery level) in to play too. And timers for ignoring him, triggers for if he is woken up early, scared, hit, shouted at etc.
The biggest problem is remembering the levels if closed down and re-opened. I'm hanging fire on this part for now since I recall something being mentioned about the cloud may be able to hold variables (don't quote me on that though) which will streamline things a lot compared to fileread/filewrite commands.
I know this is all very vague but I can't really post any code yet as it is in it's very early stages. But the idea is like that and I absolutely welcome any suggestions for moods and levels to make it even better and even more real. And any other suggestions for what you dream of when you think of robots with attitude/personality/moods/emotions.
HERE are 2 idea's for emotions ,love and afraid