An elegant, sophisticated humanoidfor developers

Speecys SPC-101C
An elegant, sophisticated humanoidfor developers
22 degrees of freedom include the ability to tilt thetorso backwards and forwards and rotate its wrists.by Lem Fugitt, www.robots-dreams.com

For years, Tomoaki Kasuga worked at Sony as a key member of the AIBO development team. He had a challenging and fulfilling job and was involved in one of the most well known and most highly respected robot projects in the world. But he wanted to do more. He had a dream.More than anything, he wanted to create a humanoid robot that would be completely open, an easy application development platform and could move around and actively communicate and interact with its environment. He wanted to design the type of robot that, as a software developer, he had always wanted to have but could never find on the market.Finally, his passion became so compelling that he struck out on his own, quit his job at Sony, obtained investment capital and established a new company, Speecys, which is dedicated to making his dream robot a reality. We had the opportunity to spend several weeks evaluating Kasuga's new SPC-101C robot and can say frankly that it is exciting, unique and a pleasure to work with.

22 Degrees of Freedom

Like many of the popular humanoid kits on the market, the robot stands 33cm (13 inches) tall and tips the scales at 1.5kg (3.3 pounds). But that's where the similarity ends. The SPC-101C has expanded the typical 16to 17 number of servos (degrees of freedom) to 22. The additional servos provide much more realistic motion and give the robot the ability to mimic human body language very closely. For example, the robot can tilt its torso backwards and forwards at the hips just like a human. This capability saw practical use during our testing when we needed the robot's built-in camera to look at an object on the floor directly in front of it without losing its balance.
The video camera, mounted in the head, provides surprisingly good image quality. The camera can be panned using the head servo and adjusted up and down by tilting the torso at the waist. Dual stereo speakers are built into the torso sides and provide quite good voice and sound quality when the robot is still. Unfortunately, the whine generated by moving servos sometimes tends to degrade the overall audio experience a bit.

The SPC-101C features 22

servos, stereo speakers,

unique LED displays and

a video camera that put it in

a class by itself.

Specially designed LED arrays in the hands and chest provide the ability to display characters, text, or block graphics such as a big red heart under program control. Think of them as robotic emoticons. Speecys needed the mechanical design to be highly reliable and dependable, so they work- ed very closely with Futaba and selected theproven RPU-50 CPU robot controller and RS301C servos. The controller and servos use RS485 Serial Communication that provides for querying the servos' positions, torque load, temperature and other parameters. The robot is powered by a Futaba 7.4V 780mAh Futaba LiPo battery, or, for extended programming sessions, it can be operated while plugged into the charger. It was great to be able to run a long test sequence without having to constantly worry about running out of battery power.
To get new users started, the ITR Motion Editor for Speecys ships along with the robot and features an interactive 3D editor display window, timelines, the integration of audio and voice files, control of the integral LED displays and a broad library of poses and motion files to chose from.

Wireless and Platform Independent

The robot's basic specifications are extremely competitive, but that's just the beginning of the story. Surprisingly, the robot's operating system is NetBSD, and it communicates using a USB Wireless Lan IEEE802.11G module. It even supports its own IP address. That makes the robot truly platform independent. As long as your system can send it commands and data in the correct formats, it doesn't matter whether you run on Windows, or Mac OS, or Linux, or your application is written in Visual Basic, C#, Java, or any other development language.
And as long as the robot has wireless connectivity to the Internet, it doesn't matter whether you operate it from 5 feet or 5,000 miles away. One of our tests involved operating the robot from a remote room on a different floor in the building, and it passed with flying colors. Along the same lines, Speecys has developed proof-of-concept remote presence applications utilizing Skype to allow the transmission of the robot's video feed along with control commands.

Open Source Software Development Kit

To actively stimulate application development for the robot, Speecys developed an SDK appropriately named “Open Roads.” The SDK can be downloaded from their website and is completely royalty-free, even for commercial applications. The underlying SDK approach is surprisingly simple: you communicate with the robot using TCP/IP socket data streams, and each command has its own basic data packet format that's very logical and easy to understand. Almost all of the data file formats are flat ASCII text, but there are a few exceptions such as the audio files.With simplicity often comes power. The open SDK and data formats facilitate the use of a wealth of well established, proven application libraries. For example, the Microsoft .Net 3.0 System Speech libraries can be used to add voice recognition and synthesized speech to the robot. Video capture, object recognition and tracking and other advanced functionality can also be added using the same approach.

A great deal of attention was paid to the robot design, including layout, circuit boards and wire routing.