fschutzman's profile - activity

I do not want to reinvent the wheel on this one. What I have in mind is a program developed that shows a simplified face maybe a little better that eyes,nose, mouth (maybe a smiley face at first) in cartoon style accompanied with voice or text message shown on a tablet.

I would like to develop a robot head that really is only a tablet mounted vertically that can locate, turn, and interact using on board camera. The user can either via voice recognition or touch screen interact with this stationary friend. I am sure some of this is already done. If someone (I have limited robotic and programming experience) can organized in modules so the user can start with:

1. Porting Linux to a spare tablet such as the old Viewsonic tablet that is collecting dust right now.

2. Interfacing with the tablet throughthe micro usb port which most tablets have using an arduino, raspberry pi, propeller board.

3. Motor driver,gearing hardware and mounting of the tablet .

4. Accepting input through microphone, touch screen, or keyboardand camera.

5. Above mentioned display output via cartoon face and simple response boxes on the touch screen or actual artificial voice output.

   The need of using a tablet is so it can be portable or eventually mobile. Basically the tablet is the "head" and "face" of the robot friend. I think the neatest thing would be the interactive face that not as complex as the various AI programs that tend to be propriety and expensive. The whole point of this would be an inexpensive, open source robotic friend especially for old folks and childern. This is not exactly fleshed out but a starting point for a discussion about a desktop robot friend.

Thanks for the input. I have seen robots running with far less computing power than a tablet. I was thinking of converting to linux to remove the constrictions that an android operating system. Too bad someone has not figured out how to make the tablet act as just a smart monitor taking input from another computer. The problem I see is that the necessary computing power of a robot requires a big form factor which is not advantageous to something small on a desk. I am sure someone can come up with an "app" that produces a moving face. Anyway it is a thought for someone to go with.