I got thinking about way back when in 1972-74 in undergrad school. I was doing some work in AI, albeit within the psych department. This was before the heyday of neural network although there was some activity in the area. I ran across the book, Intelligence: Its Organization and Development by Michael Cunningham. He proposed a rigorous, testable way in which intelligence organizes in the infant. I guess it didn't work out since it didn't make the front page of the New York Times as a major breakthrough sometime in the intervening decades.

Interestingly, a web search turns up little information beyond citations. None of the titles in the citations indicate a successful implementation or breakthrough based on the work.

I still have a paper I wrote about the book and a description of a FORTRAN implementation that never got finished.

One of the challenges back then, and remains so somewhat today, is that testing ideas like this requires a simulation environment that can be as compl…

The last post left off with me wondering why the Trapped behavior needed to be called even when a higher priority behavior was active. Here is why:

Remember I ported the code from the Command Module (CM) version to the Windows on the Fit PC Slim? In Windows there is a clock and in the CM there isn't. In the newer version I can setup a timeout by taking the current clock time and adding a delay. Then when the clock exceeds the timeout the timer has expired. For Trapped this meant the robot had not moved for over 10 seconds, despite other activities trying to make it move.

In the CM version, with no clock the Trapped needed to update the "clock" value to see if it exceeded the timeout value.

I'd say this falls under checking your assumptions. In the CM the assumption was that no clock existed so Trapped had to maintain its own. I didn't catch that the assumption was no longer valid in the Windows version.

I've been re-reading a lot of the papers on subsumption and …

The brain of a robot is the software. The software has to take in the sensor data, interpret it, and generate commands to the actuators.

One architecture for robot software is called subsumption. It came out of MIT and Prof. Rodney Brooks who is a founder of iRobot who makes my Create robot. The idea is to break the robotos activities into small pieces. Let me build up the concept by example.

A fundamental activity of a robot is to cruise around. If nothing is to be done just let the robot drive straight ahead. So we create an activity called Cruise. It simply actuates the motors to go straight at a safe speed. It is easy to write and test.

After driving straight ahead for awhile the robot bumps into something. And continues to try to go straight ahead. This is not good for the robot or the cat or furniture it bumped into.

So we write a Bump activity using the sensors on the robot - the Create has a right and a left bump sensor on the front that wrap around a bit toward the sides. So Bump…

Time to explain the components of the robot a bit more. The diagram provides an overview.

The main platform is the iRobot Create. It is an autonmous robot by itself but provides control through a serial port connection using a protocol called the Open Interface (OI). The OI can read the sensors and control the actuators of the Create.

The Fit PC Slim is a compact, low power PC with 3 USB ports and a Wifi, plus the usual PC components. It is powered from the Create through a voltage regulator on the Interface Board (IB). The IB also carries the USB interfaces for the serial port and I2C.
I2C is a standard 2 wire bus for controlling actuators and accessing sensor input. I'm not totally sure what is going to be on the bus. I expect a compass module, at least, to provide orientation. I have sonar and IR distance sensors working on I2C but am not sure which to use. These would be backup for detecting obstacles via vision processing. A main goal is for the robot to move around without bump…

Developing software is as much a research project as an engineering process. In part this is because a developer is not usually a domain knowledge expert, say, an accountant. The developer thus has to learn a fair amount about the domain in order to proceed. Still, some of the learning occurs as the project proceeds. You have to learn what you don't know.

First lesson is that the Create doesn't provide unswitched power that is sufficient to run the Fit PC Slim. If the Create is turned on there is sufficient power. This means the Slim can't turn the Create power off because the Slim loses power, also.

Ideally the Create can stay on all the time. It has a docking stations - its home base - for recharging. The built in processing can find the base and run onto it to charge, or my software could replicate that processing.

First minor glitch is that the Create stops responding to the Slim commands when it docks. It turns out there is an undocumented soft reset command (a '7&#…

I'm not abandoning the Android work. I still want to get Galactic Guardian on the market in both a lite, free version, and a paid version. I'll just bounce between the robot and android projects as the spirit moves me.

The report from the ADC2 was that 50% of the testers in phase one liked the game so it seems well worth the effort to submit it to the market.

I'm shifting gears to robotics. Awhile ago I got an iRobot Create. Its basically a Roomba vacuum cleaner with the guts removed to make a cargo area. In this area is a 25-pin connector that provides power, TTL serial port, digital and analog I/O.

I also got a Command Module (CM) which fits onto the connector. The CM is an Atmega 168 processor that adds some additional I/O. It can be programmed to control the Create. I did so and basically reproduced the wandering behavior of the Create. It move around, bumps into things and turns away from what it hit. I added some additional behaviors such as if it got trapped, i.e. caught in the same place for a period of 10 secs, it would move to extract itself.

I want to do more with robots, such as entering in a RoboMagellan contest. That requires an outdoor capable robot that does a lot more than bump into things. A key component to me is vision. Maybe I could do that with the CM and another processor (like the CMUCam) but I really didn't …