I recently completed my MSc in Robotics at the University of Essex in the UK. My thesis was to build a walking robot quadruped which I named ERIC (Embedded Robotic Interactive Canine).

ERIC uses two mbeds, one to control his limbs and listen for commands from his master (me) and the remaining mbed to control a camera and do some image processing and computer vision stuff.

I made a short video showcasing ERIC and his abilities which I thought the mbed community might like to see.

Any questions or comments welcome.

Martin

Really amazing project! I'd love to see some of the speech recognition/machine vision source, impressive use of a micro! Also I'm a fan of the machined leg parts: beautiful bit of CAD design there!

Indeed impressive project, and I would second Giles request for some information about speech recognition and visual recognition.

So glad you guys like ERIC.

I have to confess that I used the EasyVR module for the speech recognition - see Jim's notebook page for more details.

The computer vision stuff is coded from scratch and uses the OV7670 camera to get images. Fuyuno sakura did some work on this camera and how to get it to capture images here, and I also wrote a notebook page here adding some more details.

The CV library (which I'm calling mbedCV) needs a good tidy up before being published!

That's a really nice project! What servos did you use?

I used AX-12 servos as shown in the cookbook page here

Did you have any problem with the servos, using this library? I have a problem using it with the current version (42) of mbed library. I think it has to do with the SerialHalfDuplex implementation.

Hi Georgios, Yes I had some problems with the AX-12 library hanging sometimes. In the end I actually done the full-duplex to half-duplex conversion in hardware as suggested in the AX-12 datasheet. I have never had any problems since.

I had to modify the library which I published here

Really cool dog Martin!

hello martin I'm currently working on image processing with mbed and i need to do the task similar like the Guarding part ERIC did. Your work and documentation are of great help, but you haven't explained about image processing and its code. It would be very kind of you to include that part also in your notebook.