Alfred the robot

Hi Everybody! Few times ago I bought a Robot Vacuum cleaner (Neato) for my house. It wake up my old passion for robots which have been in sleep for years, after an hard try during my students days.

When I have seen it move for the first time, with its laser scanning the house, I was very impressed! I realized this could be a fantastic base for a robot!

So I have started to play with my Neato and I first see Mr Ferguson works.

That was fantastic and it opened me a door on what I could not believe: ROS a fully functional and so interesting free robot framework.

I have made horrible map of my house and running the navigation stack with the Neato (thinks to Michael Ferguson).

I was hooked!

I could not stop there. So I bought a Asus Xtion which I use to make my Neato see the world in 3D and Alfred is starting to take life.

My objectives are multiple :

    -Have fun!

    -Build a robot as cool and as sophisticated has possible

    -Always being able to use my Neato as a standard Vacuum Cleaner! (so be modular)

I have spent a lot of time trying to compile everything on a raspberry pi to replace my laptop... but when I suceed, I realize how all I want to do is CPU consuming. The rapberry pi is not strong enough... what a pity! But no matter, I move forword!

My last acquisition is a set of 3 AX12 servos. I first use 2 of them for the neck of Alfred. He is now able to follow what he is looking at! Wonderful! For doing this, all the works of Patrick Goebel helps and inspired me a lot! Thanks to him!

I want to try to make a simple arm with this 3 servos... I Will see but for the time being I try to build a aluminium structure to assemble all of this and make it look more like a real robot!

The work is in progress for a year now and for a long time I think.

I have experiment a lot of things like Speach Synthesis, Speach recognition, face recognition and face tracking, autonomous navigation, remote controle...and I must now put all of this together to make it a real thing... putting a little of life in a mess of electonic stuff ;-)

I try to keep you informed of my moved forword!