The Leaf - Open source robot using artificial intelligence and vision

The Leaf is an artificial intelligence and vision robotic system. It is open source, software and construction details are available on the Leaf Project Web site. Make your own OSS Aibo!
$ Cost of computer parts, etc (~$2k)

The objectives of this project is:
Design and build a robot which will be computationally powerful, easy to work on, large enough to operate in a real world house environment and interact with the same household features that humans do, and be (of course) relatively inexpensive.

It should have the hardware and software capacities to carry a reasonable weight, operate for hours at a time, and perform memory and throughput intensive tasks such as vision, speech recognition and generation, and sophisticated artificial intelligence techniques.

The robot should be constructed using, as far as practical, commonly available hardware and software; preferably free or inexpensive. Standard PC equipment and software will be used for the "intelligence".

The design should be flexible enough to accommodate future changes easily including alternate drive systems (e.g. tracks), addition of an arm(s), addition of animated head, etc.

In particular, the robot should provide a good platform for research into AI, vision and navigation.

The robot design will be well documented on the web so that anyone else can duplicate our design or use our methods to design their own robot.


A suggested order of build might be:

1. Build the base and motor/drivetrain and verify it will be able to move your robot around.

2. Build the body on top of the base and make shelves and attachments to install the battery, microcontroller board, laptop PC and other PC components.

3. Build the microcontroller board and test it.

4. Add wiring to power and interface all the components

5. Add software and GO.

6. Adding sensors can be done last and will depend on what you want to do. Most programming for sensor interfacing will be done in the laptop Nav and Control software.