"Woah, I'm ready to recognize myself." - Qbo, a robot
In a mission to make a robot that could "self-recognize himself autonomously when found in front of [a] mirror," Francisco Paz created "Qbo." The bot is set up with stereoscopic vision via two cameras, ultrasonic sensors, IR, speakers, LCD, head and base movement, and packed with object recognition software and Robot Operating System components. The algorithms "SURF" and "Bag of Words" are used through the OpenPV library to analyze images. "Festival" Speech Synthesis System from The Centre for Speech Technology Research (University of Edinburgh) is used to handle speaking. Julius handles the speech recognition. Among these is a plethora of other open-source software packages, too many to name.
In the experiment, Qbo images itself, and then was asked to analyze itself again in the mirror. It learned what it looked like, and then identified. I imagine, if Qbo saw another Qbo, it would say "hey, it's me." A conversation between two Qbos is sure to be like something out of the movie Total Recall.
Qbo is cloud connected, always expanding, in different colors, a mobile app. Paz has created quite the product microcosm. See more at the Qbo blog.
Paz created several companies, and thanks to the sale of one of them he is able to spend most of his time on developing Qbo. Doing what you want, is the dream of every engineer. Take inspiration from Qbo and Paz, get out there and create your own microcosm.
Eavesdropper
