Recreating the Sony Aibo robot dog using a pile of cheap servos, 3 axis gyro, the camera, wireless, neopixel lights, LiIon power, etc. Shoulder joints, body shell and chassis 3d printed. Total cost is around $150.
Locomotion is largely based upon the designs documented by Cynthia Brezeal Ferrell (MIT mobile robots lab, under Prof. Rod Brooks) in her PhD thesis for the hexapod robot, Atilla/Hannibal.
The first attempt was using Python which presented two insurmountable problems : 1) raspian OS boot time of 1.5 minutes which is unacceptable for an embedded device and 2) python threading is not sufficient for realtime. I was attempting to make series elastic actuators but the imprecision of the threading (jitter) was leading to wild oscillations... I finally had to accept it was a dead end.
I have started over in Elixir + Nerves which is designed at its core for embedded work. I will admit it is very slow going. Not because of any deficiencies in the language or environment. Quite the contrary -- I get a 10-second cold boot time and superb stability! But rather my mind is the limiting factor here. After three decades of imperative programming, the shift to functional programming is a challenge!
