alexmschwartz/salvius

Platform for building humanoid robots

Salvius

Salvius is a humanoid robot made from recycled materials. The robot is designed to be as easy as possible for anyone to build on a limited budget.

Salvius is a robot made out of recycled materials, designed to be able to perform a wide range of tasks by having a body structure that is similar to that of a human. The primary goal for Salvius is to create a humanoid robot that can function dynamically in a domestic environment.
~ salviusrobot.blogspot.com

Key features:

• Web based user interface
• Easily customizable robots
• RESTfull API
• Modular design makes it easy to connect controllers via USB
• External status page

Setup

Installing this software on your robot should be easy. Once you have downloaded the latest copy into a directory on your Rapsberry Pi, you can download and configure the robot's api and interface by running the following commands.

apt-get install pip
pip install -r requirements.txt

Use the following to run the robot's server.

python salvius.py runserver

Note: Code for the robot's Arduino boards can be found in the salvius.arduino repository. You will need to download the code to these boards individually and connect them to the robot in order to enable these features.

Text to speech

Salvius uses the Emic 2 Text-to-Speech Module to process text into verbal sounds. Code for controling this board is available through the salvius.arduino package.

Speech recognition

This is still a bit of a work in progress, at best a few small words can be recognised.

Handwriting

The robot can hold a pen and write when given a string of text. The robot's handwriting is based on a grid in which each letter is created as a result of horizontal and vertical lines.

Communication

Salvius uses the ChatterBot library to reply to messages. This package also provides Salvius with the capability to interact with people through social media sites.

Object recognition

This includes face recognition, object tacking and learning to recognise new items. Salvius currently does not have the ability to do this, however there is plans to implement this in the future.

Unit testing

The code for this project is automatically tested to ensure that it performs as expected. These tests can also be run manually by running the command nosetests from within the repository's root directory. See (unit tests) for more information.

Notes

SSH into Rapsberry Pi

• ssh [email protected] (Your local ip may differ).
• The default password is password.

Instlling psutil

The python package psutil is used to display various system statistics. To use install this package you will need to apt-get install python-dev.

Running on Pi from a flash drive

1. In Ubuntu cd into /media/user_name/disk_name to get to the content on the flash drive.
2. Log in to http://routerlogin.net/ to get a list of the ips of connected devices.
3. ssh [email protected]
4. Mount the flash drive using sudo mount -o uid=pi,gid=pi /dev/sda1 /mnt
5. Then cd into /mnt/salvius
6. Run the server using python salvius.py runserver
7. In a browser navigate to 192.168.1.2:8000

Contributors

This project has been made possible with funding from the following sources: Jennifer Cox, Adam Iredale, Janet Wise, Glen Zenor, Boris Hofer, Señora Alderperson, Wilbraham Music, Chris Cox, June Cox, Rantz, Yuri Yerofeyev