Good Morning from my robotics lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I’m going over my long term goals for this blog. Let’s get started.
Starting off with my core goal: I want to build a social robot with a customizable personality using open source hardware and software. My hope is that anyone reading can follow along with their own robots, learning from my research and hopefully contribute back as the projects develops.
Social robotics is a field within robotics where robots are made to interact with people. I expect building the robot will be the easy part. Programming it will be the real challenge. As far as the physical robot itself, I have been considering using Proto2, a platform developed by the team at sweetiebot.net. According to their FAQ page, they intend to release Proto2 to be open source before the end of the year.
In addition to making the personality customizable, I would just love it if the software was capable of operating offline. From my research so far, my first impression is that this is a stretch goal; any potential personality software I found requires an Internet connection at all times. This may be because it is just easier to program, or if it is even reasonable with today’s technology.
This leads into my first dream level goal. Maybe, just maybe, some of the work done here will end up in a larger robot serving as someone’s service dog. I doubt a bot on that scale would be cheap without having a major reduction in price. I hear nylon muscles are under development. I may have to check back on those in a few years.
In closing, my strategy is to aim high and hope I can find the right people to work with along the way. For my ending question: What personality traits would you give a robot?