Idea for a robot

I'm want to build robots. That said raises lots of questions:

• How do I drive a motor?
• Which "brain" should I use for the robot?
• Which materials should I use?
• What kind of sensors should I use?
• How do I drive a servo?
• How do I plan the robot?
• How does everything work together???
• Which questions did I forget to ask?
• Finally - What should the robot be able to do?

I came up with an idea of a robot that should be able to drive around in rooms, without colliding into obstacles and furthermore it should be able to reconstruct the surrounding environment.

The idea itself already raises lots of issues and I decided to go a middle way between prefabricated parts and parts done by myself. For example I am currently planning the body of the robot but I'm not going to design some homebrew motodriver electronics.

So the idea is to have a robot which is capable of reconstructing the environment! Therefore I will use the Microsoft Kinect Sensor. It is basically a structured light scanner that returns an array of depth values for each pixel. There are lots of wholes and noise in the data but a very nice solution to this is a method called KinectFusion (Video). The method does a nice job but is limited to a certain volume that does not allow large scene reconstructions. I will have to find a way around this problem. Furthermore KinectFusion needs a fast graphics card and as I do not have a fast laptop I will have a robot that uses a remote server to do the reconstruction.

My plans here are to go into the details of the robot planning and building process in upcoming posts.


For now I'll show some renderings that I did in Cinema4D as a concept: