Bob the Pleo Forums
Pleo Stuff => Pleo Hardware/Software => PDK, Programming, and code => Topic started by: CaSE_Kid on December 15, 2010, 06:48:53 AM
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So, quick question.. what is the most that you could achieve through programming a Pleo?
I assume there are limits, but what are these limits?
Just curious, cause I am doing a project my senior year of high school and it involves programming a Pleo.
So before I get started, I would like to know what my limits would be, or examples of things that I could do.
Thanks for your time.
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Blimey, and that's a quick question! :o :P
Hi and welcome, CaSE_Kid, please bear with us as a only a few of us are really able to answer this for you!
*And I'm afraid I'm not one of them!* ;D
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Sorry I can’t help either.
Don’t know anything about the programming side of pleo
I think you can program pleo to work as your television remote and visa versa. Don’t know if the camera or the tracking is good enough but maybe you can program pleo to use the camera on his nose to scan documents like you can do with a mobile phone camera and present them as an image file on the PC? I doubt if you’d be able to get pleo to read the document back to you though as that would require adding in both OCR and text to speech programs and I don’t know if you can do this with the PDK . Shame though because having my pleo read back my mail would be pretty handy. No-one but I and Sam would ever need know about the bank statements lol
Really sorry I can’t be of more help But hopefully someone with a lot more knowledge than I should be around soon.
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You'd better define what you mean by programming.... Are you talking replacing the OS (which some colleges do in their classes), writing new personalities, or skits? And do you mean the program runs ON the pleo, or that the program can run on a PC that controls the pleo? People have done all of these....
When it comes to writing code using the PDK, you're biggest limits are hardware, not software. And your biggest hardware limits are audio and video inputs and walking abilities. Search the forums. You'll find someone has programmed Pleo to be a TV remote control and locate objects in a simple maze.
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The programs would be run on the Pleo. But yeah, it would be more along the lines of personalities and skits.
Opinion question then, if you were working for a business and were interested in programmers, you went to a symposium of a few programmers.
There was one that had worked on doing stuff with a Pleo, what would you most like to see from this little Artificial Intelligent Dinosaur?
Also, thank you all for the help.
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Pull apart the PDK that tells you everything, as for what I'd like to see... Well Pleo RB answered many of the things I wanted but more mini temporary personalities would be fun, like the Christmas Pleo personality (the official one, not my own).
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(mostly opinion)
> So, quick question.. what is the most that you could achieve through programming a Pleo?
As far as custom personalities, IMHO the abilities of Pleo have been greatly underutilized so far. Someone with time on their hands, a little Pawn programming and lots of trial-and-error could come up with a really good personality that runs on all the Pleos (not just the new ones).
> I assume there are limits, but what are these limits?
What do you consider a limitation?
PLEO does a great job at running simple personalities that replace the built in personality. If you live within the existing programming tools (PAWN), existing memory, existing color tracking, existing sound detection, existing leg movement (etc) you can do a lot.
IMHO Developers have greatly underutilized the possibilities of the hardware. The demo personalities are very simplistic. Unfortunately the regular personality isn't that much smarter (ie. the PLEOPM personality in 1.x or 2.x versions).
If you are looking for limitations, I can give you a ton of them.
Several examples of things Pleo doesn't do well, or at all:
- Non-trivial modifications of the personality (other than complete replacements or partial tweeking via mirroring)
- Programming in anything except for PAWN
- Voice commands and/or recognition (or any change in the built in sound detection behavior) - perhaps the Pleo RB changes that a little
- No custom visual tracking (or any change in the built in camera color detection behavior)
- Pleo can't roll over. Pleo's legs are not designed to roll over.
- RAM is tight, so big programs that need a lot of RAM will never run on a PLEO
- Pleo can't beat Ken Jennings in Jeopardy trivia
(I could go on)
But if you are willing to work with what Pleo does well, they aren't limitations.
Or to put it another way: If you try to do too much or think of Pleo as a general purpose reprogrammable robot, then you will be disappointed. There are open-source general purpose robot platforms out there that have many more technical capabilities, but they aren't as cute as Pleo.
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My advice:
Please try to define a problem first, then try to implement it on Pleo. For really simple personalities try YAPT (http://www.aibohack.com/pleo/yapt.htm). For custom motions try MySkit (http://www.dogsbodynet.com/myskit/index.html ).
For more elaborate logic, or low level robotic stuff, try the PDK.
Often the best way to find a limitation of a technology is to try to use it. Sometimes the limitations can be worked around, or sometimes you can refocus the problem to work better within the limitations.