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Rodney's New Look for 2002 Robo-makeover
Robo-makeover After a certain amount of banging about in a freezing cold shed - horrors! - Rodney emerges like Frankenstein's monster with a new look for the new year. This time he has two 3 axis arms and I've improved the head to give more reliable movement with less mechanical slop. The arms were initially just garnish, but now that I've improved the head tilt mechanism the cameras can be rotated downwards to view the arms in action. Using this sort of system I can experiment with visually guided pointing and hand-eye coordination tasks such as child-like scribbling on paper with a pencil. The new head for the robot reminds me a little of that martian from the cartoon "Duck Dodgers". - Bob http://www.fuzzgun.btinternet.co.uk/rodney11.jpg http://www.fuzzgun.btinternet.co.uk/rodney12.jpg | motters 136 posts. Sunday 30 December, 13:10 Reply
Visually guided pointing Using the new arms the robot is able to point to objects which may be of interest. The arm (either the left or right one depending on which direction the robot is looking in) points at an angle and elevation appropriate to the current head position. It's possible that this sort of activity could be implemented as a learned behavior, but in this case I've just used some elementory maths to calculate the correct pointing angles. Pointing is useful because to a casual observer without any knowledge of the internal state of the robot it's an obvious external signal saying "I'm interested in that". It can also facilitate visual labeling of the world. Concievably, the robot might point to an object and say "what is that?". A human teacher could then provide a suitable label either as text input or via some sort of speech recognition. - Bob http://www.fuzzgun.btinternet.co.uk/rodney16.jpg | motters 136 posts. Sunday 30 December, 16:13 Reply
Web page Here's ageneral description of the robot. - Bob http://www.fuzzgun.btinternet.co.uk/rodney/rodney.htm | motters 136 posts. Tuesday 01 January, 09:11 Reply
Good Progress! I like the way it's all coming together. Code and bodywork, editors and hammers... sounds like a recipe for success ;) The photo's are quite impressive - the last one especially. Keep it up! | Alex J. Champandard 934 posts. Wednesday 02 January, 07:58 Reply