Imagining a Personal Robot

lardom

I don't think I'm much different than many of you on this forum in that I am a dreamer. My ideal robot recognizes my face, my voice and obeys a few commands.
While researching the I2C protocol I asked myself "Why couldn't a PC be the master, controlling a Prop-driven robot equipped with a camera and a microphone?" The robot would only be required to devote at least one cog to transmit data to a server either wirelessly or WiFi.
Response time would be a slow but it still makes sense to me. Since learning computer programming would be years off, for me it is merely a dream. I would like to hear some of your thoughts.

RobotWorkshop

A project like this already exists:

http://www.leafproject.org/

There is a very active group on Yahoo for these robots.

It could easily use something like the Propeller SERVO controller to handle a servo driven head/face on the robot (instead of the virtual one on the screen)

If the 12V wheel kit had a higher resolution encoder it would work perfect for a LEAF robot and perhaps if one can be added it still could.

Robert

lardom

Thanks for the link. It says the project is open source. I gave the site a quick glance and it seems an 'intelligent' robot may not be so far out of reach after all. I'm not saying I could do it but I know that being part of this community and "Google" have enabled me to accomplish some amazing things. Combine a microcontroller that has 8 cogs and 16 counters with the power of a computer and... I'll see how far I can go.

erco

I don't think the first successful commercial home/personal robots will be very smart or universal. They will do one or two things. Look at Roomba, the only success story to point at.

That's what I'm betting on anyway. You'll see!