Is it possible to make an intelligence robot with R-Pi ?

I'm a mechanical engineer. I will try to use this little device for my UAV project.

Of course it's possible to do this, if you take a look at the RPi_serial board here - http://www.bitwizard.nl/wiki/index.php/Raspberry_pi_expansion_system_page#expansion_boards

This would give you access to control 5 serial ports which would give you control over at least 5 stepper motors.

You might have to write some software to interface with these but given enough time and effort there is no reason you shouldn't be able to use a RPi to control a robot or even use a GPS module and USB camera to build an intelligent guidance system for it too.

edit:

Sorry just spotted there already exists a servo control expansion board which will control 7 servos.

http://www.bitwizard.nl/wiki/index.php/SPI_Servo

So depending on what protocol you wanted to use/devices you wanted to control - you have choice of 5 serial ports or 7 servo control interfaces.

Message was edited by: Leigh de Paor

I've been thinking about this some more and was wondering how the Microsoft Kinect and/or ASUS XTION Wave device would function as a depth perception, camera for control & feedback. Combined with a GPS device this could be used to power a fairly smart quadrocopter or similar autonomous device.

having designed and built many robots in the past (and have a current build on the go as well), I find that it`s best to off load as many tasks as possible to smaller controllers, leaving your main control unit free to focus purely on data processing and task delegation.

so the mobility for instance will be a complete module in it`s own right, memory mapped and served with Address and Data, the same for an arm unit and sensor array.

doing it this way would also allow you to build a Vitual robot in the Pis memory (or any other processing unit), then it`s simply a matter of data manipulation of these memory/register areas.

we operate in a similar way ourselves, you don`t Consciously tell your heart to beat or your lungs to breathe, or move your hand if you touch your soldering iron by accident

this method can lead to interesting emergent behavior that frequently ressembles Inteligence of sorts.

hope that helps a little.

I'm pretty certain that you could use a Kinect with the Pi. The code already exists to access it from Fedora, and probably other distros as well. I have experimented with the combination and found that they play well together.

I recommend that you take a look at http://openkinect.org/wiki/Main_Page as a starting point and perhaps join the mailing list.

For the robot hardware, you could investigate the work being done with Robosapiens from http://www.wowwee.com/en

http://www.rcheliresource.com/video-mit-uses-autonomous-quadcopter-with-kinect-to-model-3d-environments/

Interesting use of kinect with autonomous robots here.

All great information on this thread, thanks.