roschler is currently certified at Master level.

Name: Robert Oschler
Member since: 2004-02-13 03:49:41
Last Login: 2009-10-08 01:02:39

Notes:

I am a hobbyist roboticist and AI enthusiast. I once built a 6 jointed robot hand, using the Robix RCS toolkit, to look for the brightest source of light in a room. It held a light receptor in its gripper hand. It's movements were controlled by genetic algorithms. Each chromosome in the population contained 6 genes; one gene per motor position angle. The fitness test was the strength of the light coming in from the photo receptor. I never entered it in any competitions, but I had a great time building and testing it. A funny anecdote about the hand. I tested it in a dark room and at one point, the two best solutions for the robot ended up being a light I turned on in the room, and my forehead (reflected light)! It eventually settled on the light.

I'm also an avid follower, and sometimes user, of the primary AI software groups; neural nets, fuzzy logic, machine vision, speech recognition and synthesis, etc.

Some more detail on the robotic hand. I built the hand in the middle 1980's. I used two computer systems to drive it; a Windows 3.1 system and a pure DOS machine. The DOS machine ran the Robix driver programs which communicated with the robot hand joint motors over an RS-232 port. I had to use two machines because the Robix drivers needed real time access to the robot hand motors. This meant you could only run low level programs that used it's robot programming language and not Window 3.1, on the same machine. The genetic algorithm code was much easier to write and test under Windows 3.1. The Windows 3.1 machine communicated to the DOS machine over a custom written RS- 232 comm bridge module.

Besides being an avid fan of this site I am also an ODP editor for Computers/Robotics/Robots, a MusicMoz editor, and an Open Site Project editor for the Science/Astronomy and Computers/Robotics categories. If you like map I've been playing with the Yahoo! maps API and built an online map of texas with local search ability.

I also moderate the Robots.net Robot forum and maintain a web site for robot and android enthusiasts at RobotsRule.com. I can't wait for the Robosapien V2 to be released so I can adapt my software to it's advanced capabilities. I've just started a new blog for owners of the Robosapien V2 robot titled the Robosapien V2 Review. I just picked up a RC Roboraptor, the robot dinosaur, and my own little Robopet robot dog. I just added the i-Cybie robotic dog to my collection so that my Robopet would have a friend.
I am obviously dying to see the new Robosapien RS Media, and Roboreptile robots shown at the 2006 Consumer Electronics show by WowWee Toys International. My latest blog reviews robots and my first entry covers reviews on Roomba. I just added a new forum section for the fabulous and adorable UGoBe Pleo forum robot dinosaur and have begun to blog about it on my blog for the Pleo, which is a different dinosaur robot from the animated 3 foot tall Kota The Triceratops. I’m looking forward to getting a Ugobe Pleo soon. The buzz floating around the Pleo dinosaur is tremendous and growing. I have not seen one up close yet, except for Pleo videos I have seen, but as soon as I do I'll add my opinion to the growing list of Pleo reviews for the Pleo robot. For now, I am entertaining myself by creating a portal for the Pleo Dinosaur that I will grow slowly during the coming year.

The latest news of course is the amazing Flytech Dragonfly. The new flying insect robot that beats its wings. The Consumer Electronics 2007 show gave us the following new robots from WowWee and other companies:

Robopanda, a bear shaped mood changing robot that can hug you. i-SOBOT, the world's smallest mass produced bipedal humanoid robot (I have one now). or the Spykee, a wireless Skype compatible spy robot (formely known as Spyke), and the Roboboa robot snake.

[Update] Fresh from the CES 2007 show. WowWee has announced a brand new spider robot called the Roboquad, a four legged robot with a high accuracy object sensing and motion detection infrared system. WowWee has also announced a pair of movie themed robots, specifically a blue and red webbed Spidersapien robot and another model done up as famed cartoon character Homer Simpson, dubbed the Homersapien. However, the zaniest robot WowWee created may be the three wheeled Tri-Bot robot.

The CES 2008 show has many creative and interesting new robots from WowWee. My favorite is the Rovio telepresence robot that allows you to watch your house remotely. With the WowWee Rovio you can quickly make patrol routes with the included point and click navigation software. My second favorite was the FlyTech Bladestar, a flying blade which is a spinning propeller (blade) that has the unique feature of having infrared sensors that can sense obstacles thereby allowing it to fly on autopilot. If you like dancing robots, then the female Femisapien is sure to catch your eye, the first female robot ever created by WowWee. A great video example of what this agile and talented female robot can do can be seen in my Barbie World parody of Aqua's popular Barbie Song. Fisher Price has upped the bar in its robotic toy line offering with the brand new Elmo Live robot, a singing, dancing, joke telling Elmo bot. But Elmo will have fierce competition now that the Thinkways Ultimate Wall-E robot has been announced. The Ultimate Wall-E robot brings the animated movie character to life and features an innovative touchpad on his remote control for navigation. This high end entertainment robot really spruces up the Wall-E Toys family. The other movie making line of robots that I like are the transformers toys, even though they are more action figure than robot. They really capture the essence and spirit of the transforming super-robots from Michael Bay's move "Transformers". You can't buy these robots yet but you can pre-order Elmo Live if you want to buy Elmo Live. Similarly, you can pre-order Ultimate Wall-E to be one of the first to buy Ultimate Wall-E. Lots of robots means lots of batteries and I have put up a web page titled Batteries Plus with tips on how to save money on rechargeable batteries.

On the Robodance software front, I'm looking forward to adding support for the WowWee Roboremote remote control to Robodance as an inexpensive alternative to the currently supported batch of infrared transceivers. For those of you that get Robodance and want to get the full Nintendo Wii console instead of just the remotes for use with Robodance, read my web page on how to get a good Nintendo Wii price on a console.

CES 2009 is underway as I write this and WowWee's new offerings are on display. First in their new line up is Spyball, the spy robot that can change from a ball to a camera dynamically and is the little brother to the self-driving Rovio spy robot. Femisapien now has a new boyfriend in the shape of Joebot made from the same design style. He too dances well and is the first WowWee robot to respond to voice commands. Tri-bot appears to have morphed in to a Tank Tread sporting explorer named Roborover that also plays driving based games. They also have branched out into a family of DLP micro projectors that can project clear video on any flat surface and includes three models: Cinemin Swivel, Cinemin Stick, and the Cinemin Station. Not shown at the show but hopefully appearing this year will be iRobot's ConnectR telepresence robot; a competitor to WowWee's Rovio.

To see this page in other languages please use Google Translate. Finally, what would life be like without a new blog? My latest blogging passion is a blog I call The Best Selling Toys blog. It will focus strictly on the toys side of the burgeoning gadgets and gizmos market.

Articles Posted by roschler

First user created Spykee video on YouTube 25 Sep 2008 at 04:01 UTC
Pleosaurus Rex : New download for Pleo owners 9 Sep 2008 at 19:09 UTC
Ugobe's Steve Bannerman : New Lifeforms in 2009 27 Jul 2008 at 05:45 UTC
Pleo Reincarnation Program 8 Jul 2008 at 04:52 UTC
Ugobe secures 12.8 million dollars in additional funding 12 Jun 2008 at 04:41 UTC
Dino-MITE - New free software for Pleo 5 Jun 2008 at 02:41 UTC
Ugobe releases 1.1 update for Pleo's software 2 Apr 2008 at 20:47 UTC
FlyTech Bladestart - Sensor driven flying blade 6 Mar 2008 at 03:49 UTC
New Downloadable Behavior for Pleo for Valentine's Day 11 Feb 2008 at 14:17 UTC
WowWee's Rovio Robot 17 Jan 2008 at 03:39 UTC

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4 Oct 2009 »

Here's a comment of mine on the current state of the robot industry and how the next great revolution in consumer technology is being held back by the current economy.

Currently nobody wants to create a toy that costs more than about $70 USD now and far better if it's around $30 to $40 (forget the $200 to $400 toy robots of the previous years). Unemployment is still rising and the credit card companies have jacked up rates on good and bad customers alike while closing many accounts just to shore up their debt ratios; two huge market forces which directly and significantly reduce both the discretionary income (cash) and layaway income(credit) a consumer has to buy goods. This leads to a vicious cycle because the vendors whose goods they would buy panic, cut their product lines (like robots this year), and lay off employees (who are after all consumers themselves and now have no salary to buy goods with).

It's so bad that in Japan, despite the fact it has one of the fastest aging populations in the world and desperately needs assisted robotics, those companies bringing those innovations to market can't get people to buy their goods (which admittedly are expensive but would have sold anyways in better times).

On the utility side of consumer robotics you might as well just call that market the Roomba market since there really isn't anything else that dominates. There is the promise of the telepresence and home surveillance market, but iRobot dropped iConnectR like a bad habit, Meccanno released Spykee but never followed up with their announced SDK, leaving WowWee to fight the good fight on with Rovio. At least they are soldiering on by continually upgrading Rovio's firmware and helping customers fix their units when it's a parts failure. The home teleprescence market should be moving ahead a lot faster and stronger than it is. It's up to WowWee to capitalize on it before a new player eats their lunch.

I'm looking forward to 2010. How about you?

3 Jun 2009 »

At E3 Peter Molyneux demonstrated Milo, a game that features a rendered ten year old boy that you converse with. Although Milo doesn't have true natural language processing but instead mostly extensive keyword recognition capability, "he" does have the ability to detect emotion in your voice. This could have interesting applications to robotics.

8 Jan 2009 »

A quick note to those looking at WowWee's products shown at the CES 2009 show. The Spyball, the rolling robot that can morph between a ball and a spycam, does not have audio. This is not be mentioned by the press. Rovio, it's big brother release in 2008, does have two way audio and also is capable of driving itself.

3 Mar 2008 »

I'll be hosting another online Pleo party with the help of Yahoo Live this Thursday, March 6 2008. If anyone wants to chat while watching my 3 Pleos raise a ruckus in real time (with audio too), just visit my Yahoo Live Robots channel at 9 PM/EST on that date. To watch you just need a Flash enabled browser. To chat you will need a Yahoo ID (they're free).

13 Jan 2008 »

CES 2008 brought quite a few new robots from WowWee. One exciting entry was the FlyTech Bladestar flying machine, a spinning propeller with the unique twist of having sensors that allow it fly on autopilot. The most interesting in my opinion is the Rovio spy robot that allows you to monitor your home remotely and easily create patrol routes to go to predetermined spots in your home, using its point and click navigation software.

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