Lt. Commander Data

Lt. Commander Data. 

Having followed Will on YouTube with this Commander Data robot, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=310AAMJrL9U&feature=relmfu and when I decided to design a new robot to connect to my new AI software under development I thought I'd build my own Lt. Commander Data. 

The underbody is build from plastic trash cans, wood and PVC pipe.  The drive motors which are not installed yet will be two MK 12v dc motors with small plastic wheels (server wheels infact) pressure fitted to the motor hub. 

The right arm is poseable servo controlled arm with a gripper.  It has 3 axis of movement at this.  The arm is very simply at this time, the elbow can move left to right, the wrist can rotate and the gripper can open and close.

The left arm under construction will use a servo at the elbow to lift and lower a hacked laser tag gun so that Mr. Data can fire a "phaser" and play laser tag.  The hack allows for rewire of the power, trigger and detection for when Mr. Data is fired back at.  In this way I can experiment with wide array of game play for the AI with Mr. Data through the laser tag system.  The laser tag gun set I purchased on ebay.com used.

Mr. Data will be wired through a tether for power and USB interface to a laptop for a link to the AI, allthough I can easily go to wireless or even onboard laptop and a battery system to lose the wires.  I prefer the tether at this time.  As Mr. Data grows so whill his system and hardware upgrades.

The neck uses a pan tilt with 3 servos.  2 servos at the base tilt the head forward and backwords.  While a servo placed in the middle of the tilt servos turns (pans) the head left to right.  The head was too heavy to use one servo for tilt.  Using 2 standard servos makes the head very steady.  The head is actually a round plasic storage jar, the type you can find cheaply at most stores and a hard plastic paintball mask I picked up on ebay.com  Mr. Data's hair is from a halloween wig, you can pick up dracula of frankenstein wigs like this at stores like Walmart after Halloween on clearance.  I cut and trimmed the wig to fit the head better.

The eyes are a webcam and PING sonar unit from Parallax. 

If you are a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan then you'll notice Mr. data is in the wrong colored uniform.  It should be yellow, but I owned a red one (don't judge, lol). 

An onboard microcontoller system will control the input/output of sensors, motors, servos and communications with the laptop.  The controller of choice at this time will be the Parallax Basic Stamp II and a rentron serial servo controller II board. 

My laptop is an HP6500 running Windows7, Visual Studio 2010 (vb.net2010), SQL, Access, RoboRealm, OpenCV and EMGUCV.  I am developing my own Artificial Intelligence software.  My goal is to create an adjustable customizable AI software setup similary to what RoboRealm does for vision processing.