My Little [Kinected] Robot

Today's inspirational project connects two of our favorite things, the Kinect and a robot.

My Little Robot

The motor control represents one of eight subsystems that work together:

• kinect
• servo motor control
• web cam
• speech recognition
• speech output
• weather input and interpretation
• rss news input
• email output

The robot is also aware of the time of day, the part of day, the part of the zodiac, the season, holidays, moon phase and historic events. Almost every sentence spoken by the robot is built "on the fly" using grammar guidelines and a thesaurus. The robot's behavior is also influenced by stuff like, the time of day, whether or not the machine in stealth mode, whether the Kinect color camera or the web camera is available and appropriate for a task, etc.

The robot uses three different contact lists to send emails --and can send emails with photo attachments from the cameras. The robot can be instantly awakened, put to standby, or shutdown. The robot downloads raw weather data and can interpret the data in meaningful ways. The robot's tail feathers actually serve as a progress bar and a notification indicator. The robot builds a slideshow of every face it sees and photographs every situation containing a group of people. This slideshow is completely navigable by voice. Every interactive event and "thought" is logged to a text file. The robot will ask for help if it determines that any of its subsystems are not working.

The robot also functions as a cuckoo clock.

Project Information URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqK_nXQ5PVg, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkBl37JObP0