Quibbler

Approaches

“The Robosapien is designed for modifications...The only way to input commands is by direct serial input to the IR-OUT pin ... and through the P1.4 (right) and P1.1 (left) touch sensors.” -- M. W. Tilden

The basic idea to hack Robospaien is generating your own command and sending it to the IR-OUT port. There are basically two ways to hack it:

• Building a board to receive commands and directly send it to the IR-OUT port. Using different signal receiver, we can control Robospaien via Bluetooth, RF, cable etc. For example, many hackers use BasicX Microcontroller to control Robosapien.
• Using our own device to generate IR command to control the Robospaien. The devices can be a personal computer with IR transmitter, an IR equipped PDA etc.

Interview

We interviewed with Dan Cartoon, a CMU student who hacked Robosapien for his project. He demonstrated the hacked Robosapien to us in his apartment. What he has done is added an extra on-board processor (BasicX) to Robosapien. With the extra processor, a Bluetooth adapter was mounted on Robosapien to communicate between his computer and the robot. A Java API was build to control it via bluetooth. All the command can be executed with the Robosapien remote control can be done with the Java API.

Conclusion

All the hacks are done on the application level. The goal is generating Robospaien IR code (in one byte), which corresponds a command sent from the remote control, and sent it to Robospaien’s ‘brain’. As we known, there are no low level hacks that directly control the motors. Although the Robospaien hack allows us implement more complex actions in flexible way, essentially, the capabilities are limited on the combinations of the preprogrammed actions like turn left, lift left arms etc.