Pervasive robotics will need, in a near future, small, light and cheap robots that exhibit complex behaviors. These requirements led to the development of the M2-M4 Macaco project - a robotic active vision head. Macaco is a portable system, capable to emulate the head of different creatures both functionally and aesthetically. It integrates mechanisms for autonomous navigation, social interactions, and object analysis. One AI approach is the development of robots whose embodiment and situatedness in the world evoke behaviors that obviate constant human supervision.
With this in mind, we developed the M2-M4 Macaco project, which is described in this paper. M2-M4 Macaco is a robotic active, modular and compact system. This creature was designed to fit different mobile robot platforms or act as a stand alone system. Another design goal was the portability of both the mechanical and electronic devices and its brain. Macaco characteristics make it a portable, fully operational robotic head whenever not assembled to a mobile platform, able to act as a social agent. A simple communications interface enables operation onboard mobile platforms, turning the robot into an autonomous, sociable machine.
The robotics research are enclosed most of the time at lab facilities in which they are developed, most often operating just for demonstration goals. We expect in a near future to have both the robotic head and its brain physically present at exhibitions/seminars, interacting socially. This new approach with complex, portable research robots will lead to commercial applications and increasing synergy among roboticists. Eventually, pervasive robotics - robots present everywhere to perform a variety of tasks - will be possible as smaller, lighter and cheaper robots become available. This robotic mechanism was designed to resemble a biological creature, exploiting several features of an evolutionary design, but adding others (such as a thermal camera for human detection and night vision) for improved performance.
The replacement of a few M2-M4 Macaco’s aesthetic components allows for the metamorphosis of a dog-like into a chimpanzee-like robot. The weight of the head, including motors, gears and gyro, is. The hardware consists of nine small CPU boards with Pentium III at 800MHz, all modules connected by an Ethernet network. Four cameras and a total of nine framegrabbers are used for video acquisition.
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