 The goal of this project is to build a robot with a personality.
I hope to get past the basic construction fairly quickly with basic
sensors like a ranger and light sensors and other basic stuff.
The subsystems are all going to be controlled by PicMicros 16F84.
They are cheap ( $5 ) quick enough and easy to program. If each
subsystem has it's own brain, then the main processor can focus
on other issues.
The main processor will be a biscuit PC with a Pentium 160, 32 Meg
of ram and a 4 Gig hard drive running Linux (of course).
The brain will be programmed in Java to take advantage of easy
multi tasking and internet connectivity. Each section will run
on it's own thread so it doesn't have to wait for each sensor to
be probed before it can move again.
As for the personality, the first thing I am going to need to do
is give the robot a list of personality traits with each one having
an assigned priority. When a trait is selected like follow the moving
object, that will temporally have the greater priority aside from obstacle
avoidance until the task is complete then it will move on to the next.
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