AI Updates

Robbie's computer is still broken so I was able to catch up on some tasks I never had time for.

The potentiometer were never very accurate I have designed magnetic encoders as a replacement they are more accurate and and just plug in the the existing structure they will be fitted on the next rebuild.

The overall control was a very hard to maintain and expand natural language is not very good with robot control some verbs are shown as nouns thus wont be interpreted as commands. In NLTK you can define what words are verbs or nouns but maintaining the files is troublesome, I tried pattern_en but it suffers from the same limitations. I also tried WIT a online language processor the learning curve is too steep and I wanted a local solution. Robbie's chat engine on the other hand works well.

I never really looked into pyaiml's capabilities but it can run system programs with command line args. For testing I reduced the loaded aimls to two one for commands the other for general response.

Of course that just puts me back to where it was before but with a lot more potential. Pyaiml will throw a error message for a unknown command I made it so it will append the command to a aiml file I only have to add the meaning later I can automate this but for now I want control over it, this sort of gives me a learning robot.

One of the intriguing possibilities is to query Knowrob ontologies.

For now I can add the name of a person from the face recognition node.

Next task is to make a semantic map and name the objects so when asked his location Robbie will answer “near the desk in the garage” not x,y,z.

All of Robbie's physical task are now controlled through behaviour trees program with action servers any task can be pre empted and resumed if there is a fault or error condition. The behaviour tree also monitors and controls Robbie emotions tasks will give pleasure doing nothing will result in boredom, when boredom reaches a certain level Robbie will do a random task that varies from uttering a quip using a Markovian chains, moving his head or arms to driving around in circles.

Using simulators like Rviz and Gazebo has made these tasks much easier.