InMoov open source robot
Whilst I like the Poppy robot, the cost of £4,500 just for the actuators blows it out of the realms of affordability - (hey, I have a custom car that eats all my money!), now, if I didn't have the car I would probably have bought this kit already.... yeah, that'll set you back about £8,500. Whilst that is about a 1/3rd of the cost of a commercial robot, I'm not looking to invest that much just yet...
My aim was to not spend time on the "small" £500 robots that you can get from the likes of EZ Robot
which are pretty cool in their own right, I like the fact this robot is modular and allows you to change and extend it as you want. But, I want to make something that is about child size, 4foot or so. That's why I was liking the Poppy. Legs can be a problem (like the Poppy) and whilst I'm not too fussed about spending a lot of time getting leg/weight/balance co-ordination right, I would rather have a bottom half that is more Pepper like.
(Next time I'm in IBM Hursley, I'll take a photo of the Pepper that they have in the ETS office)
This has led me to do some more research.....and a decision...the robot has to be bigger/life size and allow us to build it piece by piece.
Then I found the InMoov robot, which looks like it will allow that to happen:
I just need to purchase a 3D Printer (now I have a genuine excuse to get one!), I have enough servo's and Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's knocking about...I even have an XBox 360 kinect that I can re-use.
Software-wise, I don't believe there will be any problems, local coding+Cloud API calls = Cylon!
Of course, I'll be hooking it up to use all the IBM Cloud Watson API services, so expect Speech Recognition, Language translation, Visual Recognition and tapping into the Machine Learning services too....
The first step....build a finger and work our way upwards/outwards from there. I'm looking forward to this journey and where it will go. Who knows, it could end up looking after me when I get old(er).
(I'll document the journey on YouTube, a bit like this guy)
and this guy has come up with some great idea's about using ROS.org too.
If we really need to, we can have legs....but that won't be on my initial build plan:
an interesting article that I need to bookmark for later....
My aim was to not spend time on the "small" £500 robots that you can get from the likes of EZ Robot
This has led me to do some more research.....and a decision...the robot has to be bigger/life size and allow us to build it piece by piece.
Then I found the InMoov robot, which looks like it will allow that to happen:
I just need to purchase a 3D Printer (now I have a genuine excuse to get one!), I have enough servo's and Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's knocking about...I even have an XBox 360 kinect that I can re-use.
Software-wise, I don't believe there will be any problems, local coding+Cloud API calls = Cylon!
Of course, I'll be hooking it up to use all the IBM Cloud Watson API services, so expect Speech Recognition, Language translation, Visual Recognition and tapping into the Machine Learning services too....
The first step....build a finger and work our way upwards/outwards from there. I'm looking forward to this journey and where it will go. Who knows, it could end up looking after me when I get old(er).
(I'll document the journey on YouTube, a bit like this guy)
and this guy has come up with some great idea's about using ROS.org too.
If we really need to, we can have legs....but that won't be on my initial build plan:
an interesting article that I need to bookmark for later....
Comments
Post a Comment