I have not heard anyone mention Evolution Robotics yet. They have a great started kit. It uses a laptop for its brains, your laptop. It comes with limited voice recognition and vision recognition. The vision software is the same one that was licened to Sony for Aibo. Lots of little addons to make it even better. When I first saw it I was not to interested but then I discovered Ultra Hal Assistant, an A.I. program that talks to you and can be trained to understand your voice. Thinking about the combination I purchased both and now have a trainable robot that sits back and talks to me whenever I want it to. The bot can be trained to recognize many different objects such as coke cans or beer cans and if properly trained will search for the one of your choice and bring it to you if you purchase the optional grabber arm. I bought an expansion kit and it now stands about 42" tall and I am not through yet. I don't really like the way the body is buile so I want to totally redo it with sheet metal and make it at least 5' tall. I also found another site that makes animatronics figure for hollidays which include a santa, a skelleton or two and a butler like figure all of which will lip-sinc to whatever sound is fed into their input plug. I will have to wait for the hollidays before I can get one and add it on. They are relatively cheap only costing about $69.00 each and work just fine. I saw a working Santa at xmas time but it was not the one I wanted I wanted the butler character as he looks quite human. For all those interested in a 'real' robot I would suggest you research the ones I use as they will put you in command of what I would consider a real robot even if it is somewhat limited in what it can do. Bill
Just log onto Evolution.com The name of their starter bot is called ER1. It basically composed of a wheeled platform to hold a laptop and has a camera. There is also a harware controller and all is done with supplied software. You can run two different brains with very little problems, I do. Bill
I will try to post a picture or two of my little bot. The first one includes the "head" that I made for it and it is standing next to the R2D2 which itself is about 14" tall. The second picture was the work in process. I have not installed its second 'eye' or it grabber arms. Bill Damn, I can't figure out how to post pics of my bot. Can anyone help?
Well to those who wanted to know the manufactures of the ER1 robot have stopped production. I guess they just did not sell enough of them to stay in business. Now for some really fun news. I purchased a talking, dancing skelleton on eBay. He is made by Gemmy.com and stands about five feet tall. He has a microphone jack in his base and will be connected to my PC which runs both the robot and the chatter bot program that talks to me like a human. I found it was very easy to run both programs at the same time and after the new year I will start the conversion of adapting the new body to my robot. There will be an international robotics show here in San Jose, Ca in the next few weeks and I am only sorry that my creation will not be ready for that show but I certainly enter it in nexts years show and can expect to see some international news releases about it in time to come. As I said before I have never seen another robot manufactured that has all mines capabilities so I know it will be a great hit. I just don't know why others have not tried it before now. Bill
