Robosapien

RoboSapien is a toy-like biomorphic robot designed by Mark Tilden and produced by Wow Wee toys. more...

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The RoboSapien is preprogrammed with moves, and also can be controlled by an infrared remote control included with the toy, or by either a personal computer equipped with an infrared transmitter, and an infrared transmitter-equipped PDA. RoboSapien, as the advert for it says, is "The robot that thinks it's a human!".

The toy is capable of a walking motion without recourse to wheels within its feet. It is also able to grasp objects with either of its hands, and is also able to throw grasped objects with mild force. It has a small loudspeaker unit, which can broadcast several different vocalizations, all of which appear to be recordings of a human male pretending to be a great ape, such as a gorilla.

The toy's remote control unit has a total of 21 different buttons. With the help of two shift buttons, a total of 67 different robot-executable commands are accessible.

Programming of the Robosapien

The Robosapien, or more correctly the Robosapien controller, is equipped with a basic level of programmability. Users can string together movement commands to form what the toy's manual describes as either macros or mini-programs, but which are more correctly described as robotic instructions sets. A completed Instruction-set is broadcast to the Robosapien, which then saves the set to on-board memory for later execution. Instruction-set Programs can be re-played back by performing the following actions :

It is also possible to produce a sensor-keyed instruction set, where the Robosapien will then perform a specific set of actions on contact with a specific sensor system (i.e. contact with the left hand would produce a set of sounds followed by a specific programmed gesture)

Command List

User Modifications

Mark Tilden designed the Robosapien to be easily modified or hacked. The electronics inside the toy are easily accessed and clearly labeled. A growing community of hackers have devoted themselves to adding new functionality to the robot. Some hacks have added a live video camera, others an LED belt that displays text, headlights, speech synthesis, a "flamethrower" (a small torch) and more.

Soccer

At the Robocup German Open 2005 tournament two teams of three Robosapiens each played the first soccer match of humanoid robots worldwide. University of Osnabrück played against a team from Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg. Replacing the head by a PDA allowed the robot to perceive its environment with a camera, a control program could then react to this via the PDA's infrared sender.

Read more at Wikipedia.org