Jordan’s Gumstix Robot Project

Bringing LEON to life...

Project Plan

Phase 1

The second phase of LEON will incorporate self navigation. Using optical wheel encoders and possibly accelerometers, LEON will be able to keep track of where he is in the house. I will be able to program which areas are safe-zones and which are off limits. LEON will be able to wander around and hopefully not crash into anything, or go down the stairs.

Phase 2

The first phase of this project will include building the physical frame of LEON. To begin with, LEON will have two powered wheels in the back and a head that rotates left and right so that he can see in all directions.. Leon will have decorative arms but they will have no function at first.

Leon will be controlled in real time from my computer. I plan on using the wireless network in our house to send commands to LEONs controller.

LEON will have an Ethernet camera mounted on him that will allow me to see where he is and what he sees from my computer, or as I call it, the Control Center!

Finally LEON Phase 1 will incorporate text-to-speech translation which will allow me to type messages and LEON will speak them. This gives the robot the ability to communicate with people and it’s fairly simple to do using premade Linux packages.

For the third phase of the LEON project I want to design a mechanical arm for LEON that will allow him to pick up objects and perform random tasks.

I haven’t really thought too much about how this arm will look or what will power it. If you have experimented with some designs or have any ideas I would love to hear them.

Phase 3