Cloud Robotics Hackathon: Darwin-OP, an Ubuntu Linux Machine with legs!

Do you ever sit your couch and realize you need to go to your computer to do something on your server, you need a bigger screen than your Android, but you don't feel like getting up and going to your computer?

Here's a solution: Darwin-OP!


Darwin is a little humanoid robot, about all he is good at right now is playing soccer, but he is indeed a linux machine with legs. With a few bash scripts, or an Android which pings him, you can easily program him to walk over to your couch, let you plug in a screen and keyboard and you've got yourself a "remote head" with an all new meaning of the term.


At the Cloud Robotics Hacakthon in Montreal I had the good luck to meet a Darwin-OP in person, and even SSH into him and poke around. I couldn't do much more than that because he was running Ubuntu 9.10, and we couldn't find any mirrors serving up packages so we didn't have time to update him so we could install what we had been planning on installing including Mercurial, ROS, Festival or Sphinx etc. In the end we settled with a very simple goal, hacking his demo code to make him play musical chairs with our other robot, a little DFRover.




Darwin's code is on SourceForge, and it might even be possible to simulate him. At the moment he has modules for Motor and Vision (crucial when playing soccer).

Link to what we got done during our hackathon project:

https://github.com/cesine/roogle-darwin/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclosed+label%3AMilestone-Hackathon

Link to our Github project and codebase:

https://github.com/cesine/roogle-darwin