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Open-Source Humanoid Meet Pino
Open-Source Humanoid PC World is featuring and article about Pino, the first humanoid to be fully open -- Building the Linux of the Robot World. Trying to build on the success of Linux, a Japanese project has released the entire specification of the robot online. For the moment, the thing is worth about the price of a small car, which is a fair deal better than Sony's efforts. Other notes of interest include the self-learning artificial intelligence control system, which would be interesting to see in action. | Alex J. Champandard 935 posts. Tuesday 02 April, 20:53 Reply
Open source robot Looks like an interesting project. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of software though and from what I could tell the vision system doesn't actually do anything. Probably the most interesting bit would be to have a look at how the bipedal walking is done. The main necessary component here seems to be the gyroscope. Gyros are usually pretty expensive and it's the price of these items which prevented VR headsets from taking off in the 1990s. I'm planning to make Rodney as open source as possible too. - Bob | motters 136 posts. Wednesday 03 April, 01:48 Reply
Open Rodney I think the major aspect of an 'open' robot would be to tell everyone where you got the parts to build it! I mean, getting some AI in there doesn't seem to tough to me, but I'd have no clue where to start getting robotic arms and eyeballs (ok, ok, cameras... whatever ;) Sounds like a great idea though :P | Alex J. Champandard 935 posts. Friday 12 April, 04:39 Reply
Open source engineering Well yes. The whole idea is to demystify the whole thing and make it as transparent as possible so that maybe other people can potentially make innacurate coppies (remember my idea of progress resulting from innacuracies) based on the same design. I have a materials list for the mechanical components of rodney on my web site. If I had the time actual assembly diagrams might be a possibility. When the software is in a more complete state I'll also put that on the site too. At the moment I'm just reading Richard Stallman's biography. Maybe I could release rodney under the GNU licence. I think the idea of this sort of licence is that it's not legal for people to copy the design unless they also put their information back into the public domain, so that it never becomes proprietory. - Bob | motters 136 posts. Friday 12 April, 09:22 Reply
I Saw This I Saw this Evolution Robotics And I thought of you. (like the post office advert ;) | Alex J. Champandard 935 posts. Saturday 20 April, 14:12 Reply
An open and shut case An interesting site, if only for the curious ommission of any actual pictures of robots constructed with the kit. This project looks open only in a very limited sense. It looks like there are APIs but that the actual source code remains proprietory. Also the kits look astronomically expensive compared to the sort of budget which I built Rodney on. My own reasons for making Rodney an "open" project was driven mainly by the frustration at the lack of openness found in robotics projects elsewhere. Researchers usually produce papers describing their creations and the results of experiments carried out, but very rarely do the produce any detailed information on the hardware and programming of their machines. Sometimes this is to protect commercial interests, but most of the time I think it's just out of pure laziness. Surely scientific method dictates that you need to make clear all the details of the experiment so that it can be independently verified, and so that others can build upon earlier work. Too often in the AI world I've seen people basically reinventing the same thing again and again. - Bob | motters 136 posts. Saturday 20 April, 17:18 Reply