Autonomous robot

[Steffen]

As I study Cognitive Sciences I get an insight into very different fields of research starting from neurobiology over psychology to AI and neuroinformatics.
As I want to specialize in neurobiopsychology my idea is kind of dumb. But I am interested in AI robotics and wanted to program my own little robot with simple algorithms. As this will be a low-budget-do-at-home project I want to spent as little money as possible and my problem is to find a cheap, free programmable robot. It should become autonomous in the broadest sense and does not have to have lots of functions. It's just to try some of my small programming skills.
So, has anyone a good idea what robot I could use and how to program it easily (which kind of programming language besides C or C++ and how to get the programm into the robot)? As you see I have little to no knowledge about this stuff...

[Philipp Benner]

Hi Steffen,

the Khepera III [1] is probably a good starting point (it is also used in our neurobiopsychology department). You can either control the robot remotely or obtain a KoreBot add-on and control it via this board. Remote control is text based and therefore really simple. That is, you just send commands as text and get text back (there is also software for this). But it is probably more fun though to use the KoreBot board where you can execute programs on the embedded linux system. Since the processor is a XScale you need a C-compiler that generates right code, but they provide a toolchain for this. It contains (among other things) a compiler that runs on x86 but generates code for XScale. LibKoreBot is a library that you can use in C programs to control the robot. It provides all the low-level stuff so you don't have to bother about this. The easiest way to transfer and launch programs is probably through an IPoverUSB device.

Hope that helped...

Greetings from Norway,

Philipp


[1] http://www.k-team.com/kteam/index.php?site=1&rub=22&page=197&version=EN

[Steffen]

Hey Philipp,
nice you found the way here
The thing about Khepera is that it is still too expensive for me. I don't want to do this stuff so professionally and therefore don't want to spent much money. I knew about these robots being used in our department and I already searched for some offers some months ago. I rejected the idea because of the price...
But thanks for the answer anyway. Hope to see you next semester in Osna, or are you staying in Norway for one year?
Greetings from the other end of the world (Florida)
btw: It's still 24°C here

[Philipp Benner]

Hi,

sry for the delayed response. Unfortunately, hardware like this is always quite expensive compared to standard pc hardware, so I don't think that there is a much cheaper robot which you can program without profound hardware knowledge.

> Hope to see you next semester in Osna, or are you staying in Norway for one year?

No, just one semester, which is almost over now (only four month). So I'm going home next friday
btw. -5°C here, good that I'm leaving now ;-)

Cheers

[Steffen]

Hm, I thought something like that. A stupid idea I had was to buy all the roboter parts at conrad and to braze it together by myself. But this thought stayed in my mind for only a few seconds until rational thinking came around and kicked it out.

offtopic: I will leave campus on Saturday but I will drive down to Key West to enjoy the Carribean-like sun for 4 days and go snorkeling, afterwards I will spent 2 days in Miami Beach to get even more sun and finally I will drive to Orlando to get rid of my last money and fly back to Germany on the 23rd. Just as it is for you, it is time for me to go back home, because the pool takes some time for adaption as the temperature of the water falls below body temperature 
Hope you did well in your semester abroad.