Robot Bear is a social robot platform controlled by Android OS. It has 8 motors (head, eyebrow, hand, leg movements). It uses eyebrow to express feeling to the user, such as happiness, sadness and anger. It also comes with Face tracking capability to keep eye contact with the user. With Android OS, it can use the built-in TTS to talk to user and help user to gather information from the Internet.
AR Drone provides API for Linux, iPhone and Android.
But if you want to control the AR Drone using simple UDP protocol on your Android. I have prepared a simple test code for you all. It is only tested with AR Drone 2.0 on Android 2.3 or above.
IEEE just released an iPad app with detail description about robots around the world, including information and 360 degree photos. It is a must-have for robot lover:)
Android smartphone is a very powerful device, with GPS, digital compass, gyro, and accelerometer inside, which can be a great platform for making robot. Moreover, the dual core processor inside can perform intensive calculations as well.
In order to let my Galaxy Nexus to control the motors, I used the cheap wifi router: TP-LINK WR703N as a wifi to serial bridge to my motor boards. I can simply send tcp packet to control the motors.
My ultimate goal is making an autopilot robot using GPS, but the result is very bad as the best positioning accuracy is only around 10 meters.
I think GPS reading should only use as reference, I may need to consider other sensor readings to calculate the best estimated position of the robot during navigation.
Anyway, here is the screenshot of my app:
Here is the video showing the robot using digital compass on the phone to adjust the orientation:
For GPS and digital compass programming, I would recommend you to read this project:
For disabled people, may be has difficulties to control a smart phone, now using Neurosky's MindWave Mobile (Brain wave sensors) as an input device to any Android device. Though the app presents very limited information, it is still a good demostration.
Found an interesting app on Android, it aims to help people with blindness or color blindness. It captures the images from the Android Phone and tell the user (via Text to Speech) what is the main contributing color on the screen. It should be a good way for them to explore the world.
