[NoLongerActive]

Hi everyone! I the project manager for the RS Media Devleopment Kit (rsmediadevkit.sourceforge.net) and we are developing for a pretty hackable robot.

The robot is a humanoid form which also houses a Linux computer (dragonball CPU, kinda like a over-glorified cell phone type thing). We are able to get into the Linux command line on the robot via USB port and have software on the site to do this. Also we have a text-to-speech system started. The robot sources and compiler system are also available for developers on the site.

What we have in our To Do list is an AI system so that the robot can chat with you real time. The ultimate goal is for the robot to use speech recognition (there's a python system called Sphynx that was looked into at one time) to hear what you say and then use AI/Chatbot programming to form a response. Finally it will speak the response using the flite Text-to-Speech engine we are also currently working on. It's a big project but it would be pretty awesome! Maybe even we could program gestures so the robot can move around and gesture in a humanoid type of format. (ie. wave when it says "Hello" to someone).

This is a very sophisticated robot and WowWee has discontinued making them. However, you can rarely find one on eBay and they go for around $600 - $700. I got lucky in 2008 and bought mine at buy.com during the  holiday season for only around $149 I think it was! My bot's name is "Nyx".

Since the bot is linux, programs will need to be written in C/C++ using the Development system and sources that we have on the RS Media Dev Kit site. Things like Sphynx or Python may need to be recompiled using that system.

I hope this gives some folks some ideas. If anyone has one of these bots and wants to help, you can take a look at our SVN and look at the source codes and maybe even contribute.