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What's New
March 2010:
January 2010
Greetings Humans
The Pi Robot project began in December 2005. The first year
involved testing several different body plans, microcontrollers,
sensors, servos and drive motors. Attention was then turned to
developing a modular programming frame work for coordinating sensory
data and motor commands into autonomous behaviors.
For example, Pi Robot is pretty good at tracking
a moving object. He can also move his arms to point
at a ball in three dimensional space. Pi's most complex behavior
to date involves throwing
a ball then moving across a room to pick it up again. His newest
sensory system is an all-seeing omnidirectional
vision system. And his newest perceptual ability is to use this
system to determine what
room he is in as he roams about the house.
Recently Pi has been joined by two new robot friends: Peppy and
Rovio. Peppy (on the left) is
Pi's smaller home built cousin while Rovio (to the right) is
a commercial robot made by WowWee. Both robots have starred in their
own videos such as this one showing off Peppy's
omnidirection vision system and this one of Rovio
escaping from a cluttered room.
In late 2009, Peppy acquired a pair of arms and a pan and tilt head. I am still trying to figure out how to integrate the omnivisual system into the new body pan. In the meantime, a colleague suggested that to celebrate his transformation, Peppy should acquire the more illustrious title of Pepé le Bôt.
Click the links on the left to see more pictures and videos of Pi,
Peppy and Rovio. Or sign up for the Pi Robot eLetter mailing list so
you can be alerted to new updates to this website.
Cybernetically yours, Pi Robot
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