Anyone observing the home pages of the Sentience and Robobridgeware projects could be forgiven for believing that very little progress has occurred there for a year or more, but this could hardly be further from the truth. Most of the stuff which I've been doing has been unglamourous work on the low level systems, getting one system to talk to another, simulation/unit testing and bug hunting - and there have been some most heinous bugs. Progress has been slow, since this is only a hobby project which I work on maybe one day per week, but improvements have been accumulating and eventually a critical mass of software will be achieved.
The GROK2 robot, which I'll be using for tests, is only intended to be - to borrow the phrase used by Donald Michie - a "research purpose robot". I'm not intending it to be of any commercial value or interest. However, I have been trying to write the software in such a way that there's a strong degree of hardware abstraction, which should allow me to easily tailor the same system to other types of robot in the future, with minimal rewriting of code. The software design is also very friendly to multi-core systems, so that as more processing resources become available performance will increase.
In the longer term I expect that consumer priced PC based robots will become a reality, after countless years of struggle and false dawns. Once that happens commercial applications might become something worth investigating. If I get to the stage where I think I have visual perception software which could be substantially useful, and am sufficiently frustrated by lack of progress on the hardware side of things, I might even try to start a PC-bot business myself, since I think I have most of the requisite skills (except for sales/marketing).
1 comments:
Hi there :)
Thanks for punting us!
Karl
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