Mind / Iron
by Bryan Bergeron, Editor ;
Embedded Linux
Development Platform
I had the pleasure of speaking with a fellow robotics
enthusiast, Eric Gregori, about his latest contribution to
the field of affordable robotics. Eric started building
robots at eight, and continues his passion/obsession
today as the Embedded Firmware Product Specialist at
Freescale Semiconductors. Because Freescale is into
selling silicon and Eric is into robotics, it seems as though
he’s one of the lucky few people that get paid for what
they would otherwise do for free.
Eric’s latest project is extending his RobotSee
software platform ( www.EMGRobotics.com) to work
with the new robot from Freescale: the Freescale Tower
Mechatronic Robot. RobotSee is a free, open source
robotics toolkit that works with Windows, the Chumby,
Android tablets, and phones, and Linux. As you might
expect, RobotSee provides a vision toolkit that includes
features such as face recognition. Moreover, the toolkit —
which uses an easy-to-use language with similarities to
both C and Basic — supports voice recognition, speech
synthesis, GPS navigation, and even an interface to those
affordable brain-machine interfaces that are on the
market.
The Freescale Tower Mechatronic Robot (which I’ll
refer to as simply ‘Mech’) is Freescale’s first entry in the
market targeting robotics enthusiasts. At $199, Freescale
is positioning the robot as the next step up from robots
based on the Stamp or Arduino. The basic board —
which goes for $99 — uses a MC52259 32-bit
microcontroller with 64K RAM and 512K Flash. It has
space for two plug-in daughter boards, including a $25
magnetometer or compass and a $99 three-axis
accelerometer. There’s also a pair of USB connectors,
analog and digital I/O, I2C, SPI, and even a legacy RS-232
port. Development software includes free versions of
Code Warrior and RobotSee. In terms of difficulty,
RobotSee is just a bit more challenging than, say,
programming the BASIC Stamp. Code Warrior, on the
other hand, requires modest familiarity with C/C++
programming, and doesn’t come with built-in libraries for
vision, speech, voice, and the rest.
6 SERVO 06.2011
