Robots and Physical Computing

Reblogged from:  http://scott-ltattempts.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/robot-behaviours.html Behaviour based robots was used in the teaching as way of getting the students to think out AI a little deeper and in particular  Do we need Human Level intelligence ? or rather  Do we  always  need to aim for Human Level Intelligence? Lego Mindstorms robot are a good vehicle for students to start trying out idea around behaviour-based robotics. They are inexpensive, programmable and with the  LeJOS  software installed on them; have behaviours built into the programming which is done in Java. A good example to use comes from Bagnall's book (B Bagnall (2002) Core Lego Mindstorms:  Programming the RCX in Java , ISBN:  978-0130093646) code 1: HitWall //Taken from Bagnall (2002) import josx.robotics.*; import josx.platform.rcx.*; public class HitWall implements Behavior { public boolean takeControl() { return Sensor.S2.readBooleanVal...

In the previous blog posts for this 'series' "It is a good time...."  Post 1  looked at the hardware unpinning some of this positive rise in robots; Post 2  looked at social robots; Post 3  looked at a collection of small robots; Post 4 looked at further examples of small robots Robots, such as the forthcoming Buddy and JIBO, will be based some established open sourceand other technologies. Jibo will be based around various technologies including Electron and JavaScript (for more details see:  http://blog.jibo.com/2015/07/29/jibo-making-development-readily-accessible-to-all-developers/ ). Buddy is expected to be developed around tools for Unity3d, Arduino and OpenCV, and support Python, C++, C#, Java and JavaScript (for more details see http://www.roboticstrends.com/article/customize_your_buddy_companion_robot_with_this_software_development_kit ).  This post contin ues with some of the software being used with the smaller robots.  A number ...

In the previous blog posts for this 'series' "It is a good time...."  Post 1 looked at the hardware unpinning some of this positive rise in robots; Post 2 looked at social robots; Post 3 looked at a collection of small robots; This post contin ues  with small robot idea a bit more, looking at some of the other robots I have been fortunate to be able to play with. The opinions are from a personal point of view of playing with them, but comments are very welcome. Kbots The kilobots ( http://www.k-team.com/mobile-robotics-products/kilobot )were designed to be relatively low-cost devices specifically designed for work on swarm/collective intelligence experiments. Developed at Harvard University as a scalable system to program groups of robots (now into the thousands) ( http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/ssr/projects/progSA/kilobot.html ). Individually these are quite simple units, they move by vibration. The real advantage, in my opinion, of the system though i...