According to the brochure, Pleo is an "artificial lifeform" produced by Ugobe. Pleo is a robot with the shape of a small dinosaur. The explicit aim of Pleos developers was to build a rebot, that interacts especially on the emotional level with its owner. This relativly new approach to human-robot-interaction makes Pleo an interesting platform for scientists working in this field.
Instead of keeping the technology behind Pleo closed, Ugobe encourages the Pleo-comunity to work with Pleos hard- and software. So, here we present two tutorials to increase Pleos possibilities of interaction and orientation.
Pleo Spycam Hack
An "out-of-the-box-Pleo" has a built-in camera to allow basic pattern recognition. Within the Pleo comunity the possibility of face recognition and face tracking has often been mentioned. In our oppinion, this is not realistic using just the actual hardware: On the one hand, the resolution of the camera is to low and the already weak image quality gets even worse by the small Plexiglas-window in front of the pinhole lens. On the other hand, the built in 32-bit NXP ARM 7 sub processor may have to litte calculation power to perform complex real time patter recognition such as face detection. So we came up with the following solution: We use a small RF-spy cam to transmit image data to a PC where it is processed. The PC sends the control commands back to Pleo via RF (s. XBee Hack). Here you get the tutorial.
XBee Hack
Pleo has two serial ports: One inside with Bluetooth preparation and one next to its power switch under a small plastic coverage. Via these ports you can get informations on the actual internal state of Pleo and send commands to control Pleos reactions.
A XBee Module can easily replace the serial cable from Pleo to the PC by a RF-connection. The described XBee hack is based on a first version of PleoPet. Without his help, this tutorial would not have been possible. Thank you very much!
ATTENTION!
By the described modifications are for scientific purposes only and void the warranty of Pleo! By some of the modifications Pleo can be partially or completely destroyed. Perfoming the described modifications is on the owners own risk!
P.S.: It would be great, if you would take part in our online study on future scenarios concering robots. The filling of the online questionnaire takes about 5 minutes. Thank you very much!
