Rodney by Bob Mottram

Rodney is a small upper torso humanoid robot which I designed in order to do some experiments with
stereo vision and social interaction.  The robot started its short life in the summer of 2001 not as
a humanoid at all but as a pan and tilt mechanism to hold a pair of webcams in place.  The original
idea was to use a pair of cameras to gather 3D data from the architecture of York and construct
computer models of buildings automatically.

Rodney is used mainly for vision experiments, although he also has speech presently using the
Microsoft speech SDK.  I've gradually added more axes to the robot and given it a few facial
movements for some affective feedback.  Experiments which I've done so far using the robot include
object detection, face detection and pose estimation, gesture recognition, speech and vision based
interactive learning, and a limited amount of reasoning using the Open Mind commonsense database.

Future additions to the robot will be a sense of touch on the hands, redesigning of the lower arms
and more facial movements for the head.


Email: fuzzgun@btinternet.com