MICRO ROBOTIC: July 2011

Welcome

This blog details my finding in building and setting up a small web connected humanoid robot.
The first objective of this project is to fully control and monitor the robot from internet.
This will be done by adding a single board computer running a full Linux system connected to the Robovie Nano robot by the serial port and connected to the web by wifi.
Beside web remote control, I will take advantage of the complete Linux system to add some higher functions to this robot (environment analysis, navigation, speech & video recognition,...).

There are several constraints in this project.

At first a limited weight and space . The Nano is a very small robot and the available space is quite narrow (6 x 3 x 2 cm in the back) .

The added weight load must be under 100 gms (Linux board + battery + wlan+ audio + webcam + sensors ) if we want to keep fluid motions and good autonomy.
Due to theses constraints I have to work with a minimal processing power. I am using a Bifferboard from Bifferos running a full Debian Distro at 150Mhz.

The tasks and progress are:

Build Debian kernel & rootf : (done) Debian Squeeze with headers. Linux 2.6.32.2
Wlan (done)
Remote motions control (done)
Remote master slave control : (done)
Video streaming - 2 ways : (done)
Vision/Blob recognitions (not started)
Sound streaming - 2 ways (wip) - can play stream, can record sound
Speech Synthesis (done) - flite working well, espeak is choppy but still usable
Speech Recognition (wip)
Remote Sensors monitoring (done) Battery level, accelerometer, distance, temperature
Lcd usb display (done) - hacked 1.5" key chain

Oled i2c display (wip)
Auto charging (not started)

Friday, July 1, 2011

BOA WEB SERVER

apt-get install boa
http://www.boa.org/documentation/boa.html#toc3

Start with: boa
CGI SCRIPTS IN: /usr/lib/cgi-bin/scripts

To modify in /etc/boa.conf
# User: The name or UID the server should run as.
# Group: The group name or GID the server should run as.
User root
#Group root