Nick already mentioned it shortly yesterday, but I’m currently busy with my final school project. That doesn’t mean that I can’t work on .simplicity anymore, though. On the contrary. Because Computer Science plays an important role in my final school project I’ve more than enough to tell on .simplicity. You see, I’m currently developing an artificial intelligent robot called Artificial Intelligent Agent (Aia).

Aia is build around the Arduino. The Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform. It’s a cheap solution for developing hardware. The fact that the Arduino is cheap doesn’t mean that it’s low-quality. You can make great things with it as it’s highly flexible. Besides that it’s also very easy to use as the Arduino uses a programming language which is based upon C and C++.

Photo by Nicholas Zambetti. Taken from Arduino.cc

But lets talk a bit about the project itself. The goal of the project is to create a robot that is able to do simple pathfinding. Aia will perceive the world through colour analysis and distance estimations. Maybe it will also be able to recognize shapes, but we’re not sure about that yet.

At the moment of writing our control panel (Aia|CP) is able to perform colour analysis of webcam images. It also contains a Lua terminal. And it’s able to set up a basic connection with Aia. On the other things we still need to work.

But that’s all for now. You’ll hear more about it in the future. And when it’s done the source code will probably become open-source.

- Michael

PS: In case you didn’t notice it… I’m not the only person working on this project. I’m just the developer. Bryan (surname-less) is responsible for the electronics. And Arjan (surname-less) is responsible for the design.