Jean-Pierre Redonnet Wiki

Welcome the Openbot AMSR Project

The aim is to create a family of service robots based on common modules in order to decrease their costs. The three common modules are the locomotion module, the intelligence module and the vision module. There are systematically used in the service robots with minor changes.

The locomotion module provides the geared motors, the battery, the converter and the charger.

The intelligence module includes the computers, the communication devices, the gps, gyroscope, accelerometer and various environment sensors.

The vision modules contains the stereoscopic videocamera, the stereophonic microphones and the ultrasonic range sensors.

Each modules can be easily fastened in various configuration depending of the shape of the robot. The modules are sealed, they evacuate the heat through their external surface, they secure the mechanical, electrical and electronic elements mounted inside, and finally they provide several fastening points to attach the external elements such as a frame. The wiring between module is limited to the power supply cable and the communication cable. The cables are plugged on the modules though sealed connectors.

The external shell covers the modules and the cables. This shell doesn't provide a strong mechanical protection, the modules and the cables are designed to be robust enough to endure the environmental and mechanical stresses without requiring any protection. The shell is mainly used to give a pleasant appearance to the robot.

Open Source Softwares:

The softwares are the most important elements of the robot, possibilities of the robot depend for a large part of the softwares used to control it.. The Openbot AMSR project is based on open s ource softwares. Existing open source programs will be selected, modified and released on SOURCEFORGE, new/created programs will be released on SOURCEFORGE too. There are many open source softwares available. Currently, they must be must evaluated in regard the possibility to meet the technical characteristic of the AMSR Openbot. Below, it is a list of softwares to evaluate:

The MRPT (Mobile Robot Programming Toolkit) (http://www.mrpt.org/) project provides a set of applications and libraries which cover the robot vision, the simultaneous localization and mapping, the motion planning. The MRPT is free and open source (released GPL), many sensors are supported (3D range camera, 2D laser scanner, cameras, gyroscopes, inertial sensors, GPS receivers). Example: Robot Sancho of the University of Malaga http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwV2sN3C8Lg

The ROS (http://www.ros.org) project is an operating system for robots. It provides an hardware abstraction layer, an interprocess communication and implement common functionalities (navigation, motion planing, laser 3D processing). The ROS project is free and open source, can be implemented to many hardware, many robots such as Aldebaran Nao, Thecorpora Qbo, Clearpath robots.

The CMU Sphinx (http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/) is a free and open source project developed by Cargenie Mellon University that provide sophisticated speech recognition programs. The main possibilities are the speech to text conversion and speech control. The interesting points are the speaker independent, the continuous speech and the large vocabulary recognition. Julius (http://julius.sourceforge.jp/en_index.php?q=index-en.html) is another interesting speech recognition project, free, open source and providing high-performance. It is currently developed by the Interactive Speech Technology Consortium. The speech recognition allows the human to interact easily and naturally with robot.

The eSpeak (http://espeak.sourceforge.net/) voice synthesizer is a free and open source project that converts text to speech; 55 languages can be synthesized. The voice synthesizer allows the robot to interact with the humans. Festival speech synthesis (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/) is another speech synthesizer. This project is developed by the university of Edinburgh.

The Texlexan project (http://texlexan.sourceforge.net/) is a free and open source project that provides complete text analysis tools. It is able to extract sentiments, to categorize and summarize any text. It can be linked to a speech to text program such as pocketsphinx to analyze a complex speech and extract the important informations.

The Harpia project (http://s2i.das.ufsc.br/harpia/en/home.html) is a free and open source project developed by S2i. It provides tools to experiment and design vision system.

Quick Facts: https://sourceforge.net/u/redonnet/wiki/Quick%20Facts/