BOB, the Inexpensive Humanoid Robot / News: Recent posts

The Bob project is officially dead.

But the ZedBot project will replace it, http://sf.net/projects/zedbot and zedbot.sf.net

The first CVS commit will be tonight and will include the beginning of a cross platform robotics program.

I have successfully written both Linux and Windows drivers for the ZedBot hardware and the first in what will possibly be a continuing article on the project appeared in Servo Magazine this month (see http://servomagazine.com\)... read more

The first meeting of the 2002-3 robotics team will be on Tuesday, September 10th immediately after school in the metal shop (about 2:30). We will be discussing changes to the design for Bob II.

http://www.swig.org/exec.html SWIG creates all of the wrappers for moving my C++ code into the python code. It saves me time so I like it.

We would like to welcome aboard Bob Mottram as our new AI Advisor. He will be answering periodic questions from the team. Thanks Bob. See his intriquing website @ http://www.fuzzgun.btinternet.co.uk/rodney/rodney.htm

We are working out what tools to use with this proeject. Here are the decisions thus far:

Chat Functions:
A.L.I.C.E.'s AliceBot from http://alice.sunlitsurf.com/

Vision Features:
Intel's Open Vision Library http://www.intel.com/research/mrl/research/opencv/

Text to Speech
CMU's Festival http://www.festvox.org/

Speech to Text http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sphinx/

I have been staying away from programming thus far in this project because I have not been ready. Every programmer needs time to rest and get ready before the grind of a project and I have finished my resting. I can't wait.

-Brandon Philips

We had our first official planning meeting on Wedneday July 31st. The meeting went well and Ryan Miglavs was a excellent host (we got programmer food... SWEET :). Anyway we started deciding on tasks, modules and the overall big picture for the project. I will be uploading some meeting notes tonight. We will begin writting some of the wheel chair control in the next few days. For all of you outsiders reading this, this project will be moving fast. Do not worry about this project becoming abandonware. I have to much riding on it ;).