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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?

My site is now active. As I enter these first few words, I’d like my audience to know, setting up a blog is not easy. Sure, I could have gone an easier path, but for me, this isn’t just a robotics blog. I have a class in web languages that I will need to retake some time, and I wanted to view my site’s code and edit it.

I started with the idea about a month ago. I made my first, permanent progress almost to the hour and minute. All along, I was figuring I’d be posting by “next week,” until I completed the task at hand and the next part of the problem presented itself. Even now, I still have a lot to do in terms of web design.

Never underestimate the value of a good tech support team. I rejected at least a few services with live chat who barely passed the Turing Test solely by running out of prewritten messages and displaying a lack of English skills. One place even had a chime announcing an answer to your question. The previous two features combined provide an experience I would imagine a low end fortune machine would provide. While the same chat client with an annoying chime was used for HostGator, my host, the help was consistently productive and the chime was something to look forward to. The tech support for NameSilo, my DNS, was awesome and helped me learn the difference between a nameserver and DNS records. NEVER underestimate the value of a good tech support team.

I intend to make weekly text posts, and hope to make monthly video posts. Each week, I want to end with a question. As the site is still under construction and I don’t know how to set up a comments section yet, I ask anyone who is viewing this: What is the date you first came across this site?

Edit: Comments are open now.