Nothing new to report. I've gearing up to try to do stereo sound identification on my Robosapien V1. I took two electret condenser mics and put them on Robo's head pointing in opposite directions; basically a pair of "ears". Something to do while I wait for the Roboraptor to become available here in the USA.

If you like Robosapien or Roboraptor robots, stop the Evosapien Robosapien & Roboraptor hacks web site.

Don't forget to visit the Robots.net discussion forum.

Just saw a short movie on the WowWee Toys animatronic chimp head. I'm dying to get my hands on that thing. It'll cost about $129 and will be programmable, along with having it's own preprogrammed behaviors.

If anybody wants to discuss this, come over to the Robots.net forum and post in the animatronic section.

Waiting very impatiently for Mark Tilden's Roboraptor robot. Unlike the original Robosapien which only had simple touch sensors, the Roboraptor has stereo sound sensors and dual infrared sensors. That's enough to keep me happy for quite a while.

If anyone has a real slick way to get the information from those sensors and transmit them wirelessly to a PC, please let me know by posting a message at the Robots.net forum. Thanks.

If anybody knows of a USB infrared transmitter that is Windows compatible and about $20 or less, please let me know.

You can contact me by using the Contact Us link at the bottom of the Robosapien Dance Machine page.

Thanks.

I am really proud to announce that SourceForge has named Robosapien Dance Machine as their May 2005 "Project of the Month":

In their own words:

"Every month the team at SourceForge.net picks one project, from among the tens of thousands hosted on SourceForge.net, to honor by naming it Project of the Month."

In addition there's been a massive upgrade to the speech recognition interface of the program. It's called Voice Activated Scripting.

The last version added the ability to control your Robosapien robot with just your voice, as a substitute for the Robosapien remote control. With this new release you can create your own voice commands and tie them to any script you have created. You can make interactive dialogues that will convince your friends that your robot has emotions and a real brain. This makes movie production, comedy skits, and other fun performances even easier to create. The easy-to-use, drag and drop, graphical interface for making scripts has a few improvements as well, including some new command blocks.

Don't worry, I'll be making a new funny movie soon to show off this new feature.

I'm thinking of doing some work with the AVRCam. If anyone has any experience using that item, or something equivalent, please come to my robots forum and contact me. I've heard that it out-performs the CMUCam at "colored blob recognition".

Yesterday I released the first version of Robosapien Dance Machine with Voice Control (Version Alpha - 2.0.1). You can now control a Robosapien with just your voice. The software still has all the original powerful scripting abilities for creating Robosapien movies, dances, and performances.

What's really great is that the voice recognition is being provided by the wonderful CMU Sphinx 3.5 speech recognition engine.

You can find a movie of my Robosapien responding to my voice commands here:

Robosapien Dance Machine - Home Page

You can find the Robosapien Dance Machine files here:

Robosapien Dance Machine at SourceForge

Technical support for the program can be received here:

Evosapien Forums

It's an Alpha version so it's most likely still got some wrinkles in it. I'd appreciate a bug report if you find any problems. Currently it requires the superb USB UIRT from

Jon Rhees:

USB UIRT

I'm going to devote the month of April to supporting more infrared transmitters, especially some cheaper ones, as many of you have requested.

Thanks,
Robert Oschler
Robosapien Dance Machine

The work on Robosapien Dance Machine, our Open Source free program to control a Robosapien Robot, is completed. Sometime today or tomorrow, the Alpha version will be available on SourceForge. You can see some screenshots and find out what it does by viewing the help documentation which I have put online.

As always, please stop by the Robots.net discussion forum to talk about this or any other robot related project.

My latest project is to make an airboat using a Lego Mindstorms RCX computer and some propeller fans. I got the propeller fans off of an old "UFO" toy I had; which was a big helium balloon with two radio controlled DC powered fans attached to it.

Unfortunately the RCX is too heavy to be a blimp; the helium balloon can't hold it up. But I figure that if I put the RCX in a small boat with the two fans attached in the rear, it should make a pretty good airboat. I'll be attaching a wireless video transmitter to the boat too.

Don't forget to visit the Robots.net forum.

For those of you trying to access the Robosapien Robot Movie, wait a day or two. I'm changing ISP's at the moment. When the change is done, the link will be valid again.

Thanks.