About Our Vision
Vision
We share a "BIG VISION".
We are creating a fully autonomous humanoid robot.
The robot we are creating will ultimately be able to pass the Turing test for artificial life. We are creating a design for this robot. We are building out this website to publish this design. The website will collect information on this design and the people making it happen. The information will supplied, collected, analyzed by knowledgeable experts. The design will consist of requirements, specifications, plans and procedures to attain our goal. Larger concepts will be broken down into achievable steps. Everything on the website will be reviewed and examined. In short the Robot DHQ website content is and will be curated information.
Together we will forge a platform that will support the work and ideas of the team to achieve this vision.
We are robotics fans and makers with limited budgets. We are excited about robots. We love robots. We really think robots are the future! And yes, this is a website for amateurs. We are fans. We are volunteers but we are consolidating and synthesizing the work of professionals to approach our goal. We continually attempt to balance available resources with the needs of the design to see our vision become reality. When an inexpensive option exists that does not severely compromise the needs of the necessary function being designed, we adopt the inexpensive option as a necessary step forward toward our success.
Just because a thing can be done cheaply does not mean it cannot meet a need. By saving money and reducing costs more people can participate in the design, construction and testing of our design. Together we will create sophisticated powerful humanoid robots at a low cost.
Engineering Quality and Values
We think it unnecessary to focus on extreme precision in everything we do. There is a point where good enough is all that is needed. Expensive servos and electronic gear are not required to achieve our vision. We look at the natural systems in the animal world and find that in many cases nature is not particularly precise. Flexibility, adaptability and constant real-time adjustments compensate for the lack of precision in natural systems. We use a number of techniques that we think tries to copy what we see in the natural world. Any designer is free to copy these patterns inspired by nature. Our Intellectual Property statement is HERE. This is our default approach to solving design problems when designing our robot. A huge or unlimited source of funds is not needed. We choose to apply a creative approach to design.
We seek to take advantage of the low cost of mass produced electrical, electronic, mechanical and electromechanical components to further our design. We choose to use this approach as a team. We endeavor to synthesize and integrate existing technology. By working as a team we seek to advance the state of the art and perhaps contribute to other designers and makers whereever they may be.
We seek to enable the designer with mechanical aptitude to focus more on mechanical design and less on the electrical and computer aspects of design. For more on our vision for hardware and structure click HERE.
We seek to enable the designer with electronics skills to focus more on the electronics design and less on the mechanical and software aspects of design.
Likewise, we seek to enable the software gurus to focus more on the software design and less on the mechanical and electronics aspects of design, etc. The Robot DHQ design is an object oriented design. For more on our vision for software click HERE.
The design and implementation of the vision processing system is a particular area where design is critical. For more on the Robot DHQ vision for vision click HERE.
In general, our design will be built with hobby grade components and will not require industrial or medical grade components. Mass produced and off the shelf components are preferred over more expensive components. Regarding safety and security our robots may be considered dangerous! So, the maker that adopts anything on this website must be aware of the risks. You do what you do at your own risk. The Robot DHQ hazard and risk policy is HERE.
Electronically, little attention is paid to the issue of radio frequency interference, a.k.a. RFI. The use of unshielded wires and unquantified electromagnetic capacitance and inductance factors indicates that our design is inherently noisy from an electromagnetic point of view. For the time being it may be considered to not be environmentally or electromagnetically friendly. The risk warning above also applies here.
From a sensory motor perspective the network of processing nodes form a fabric with a potentially large number of elements. The intent is to gather, process and transmit sensor values at one "end" of the processing fabric and sythesize and transmit servo control signals at the output "end" of the fabric. Each node needs to be dedicated to a limited number of functions implementing a "divide and conquer" architecture. The effect of this is that a large number of processing nodes may be ultimately required. This may be costly in the view of some but will ultimately reduce cost in the long run. This seems to be an unavoidable reality as we design and progress toward a human scale robot.
Regarding communications between nodes the actual connections will depend on performance needs. Messages will be kept short and direct connections from source to use will be implemented when needed to achieve necessary performance requirements. It is to be expected that the longest connecting cable between two processing nodes would be to less than six feet or 2 meters in length.
If you have an idea of something that should be included in our vision, please feel free to share!