Hi Ai friends

I have designed and built a fully operation full scale robot (just over 4 foot tall) the ALTAIR EZ:1 development robot. Its taken years to develop all the mechanical/electronics and firmware, but it is worth it as the robot is now pretty impressive.

I am now looking to collaborate with people to assist in adding some (rudimentary) Ai and chatbot type features and I know this forum is friendly and also the great expertise available here. I am wondering if anyone wants to or knows of any talented people (with the required skills) that would like to join in on such an exciting venture?

Here is the EZ:1 (development robot) and the EZ:2 (commercial version)

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/x343/toymaker2/ALTAIR_Robots_2.jpg

Here is a pic of EZ:1 head

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/x343/toymaker2/EZ1_Emotion_7.jpg

The top camera/sensor does the following:

Face recognition (up to 100 different faces) – high accuracy and works in most lighting conditions.
Face recognition on TV/media - the system can not only recognize its owner and all their friends and family but also TV programs and TV celebrities from the screen in real time.
Face detection – can track (position of) faces in real time.
Face direction estimation - estimates the direction of detected faces.
Estimation of facial expressions - Five different emotion expressions:
1) Happiness
2) Surprise
3) Anger
4) Sadness
5) Neutral
Human body detection - detect human bodies in view.
Gender estimation – pretty accurately estimates a face (users) gender.
Age estimation – pretty accurately estimates a face (users) age.
Gaze estimation - can track what direction the persons eyes are actually looking at.
Hand detection – using this for hand gesture applications.

The lower camera does:

Object and colour recognition

Various other sensors are indicated on the photo.

I developed SMART servos with have amazing torque (worm driven so no holding current) and virtually silent in operation - these can be seen in the 5 DOF arms/claws.

The main locomotion system is PID based, so it moves very accurately and can learn floor/area mapping.

I would welcome any input from you guys on this - I have got the really cool robot, but now need to add the Ai functionality which would make the robot awesome! I am current investigating adding an AIML chatbot maybe Pandorabot which I currently have no experience of yet.

Thanks

Tony

http://www.appliedmachineintelligence.co.uk

Hi, Tony, and welcome to chatbots.org!

That’s one sexy piece of hardware that you’ve developed! Will it be capable of connecting to the internet via WiFi? if so, using Pandorabots will be a viable option for it. There are several members of the community here that have experience with AIML-based chatbots, and I’m sure that we can address any questions you may have in that area.

Thanks Dave!

The ALTAIR robots work via WiFi to a host computer. Pandorabots look very interesting and could be what I am looking for - I just need to get some experience with them. I see on the http://www.Pandorabots.com site that it is possible to sign up and create my own Pandorabot it also offers start AIML sets like A.L.I.C.E (2002), do you guys think I should try this or should I start a whole new Pandorabot from the start?

I appreciate all your help and advice.

Tony

I’m late for class, so I’ll have to get into that question when I get home. I’m sure others hsve their viewpoints, though, so you won’t lack for ideas.

Hi Tony! Nice to see you here as well as at the other site! Yes, it has been quite a few years so it’s nice to know you’re still kicking about!

One nice consideration with using an existing AIML set is that a lot of the categories and topical responses have already been established for you.

With creating your own, well, that might entail a considerable amount of head scratching and mumbling to yourself in dark areas of your house…. Just kidding!

Actually, one person who’s brain to pick would be our resident AIML guru, Steve Worswick, who has won several bot competitions in the UK and who knows where else….

At either rate, all of your projects and research shows your amazing attention to detail and inventiveness! Good luck!

Sorry for the delay. It seems that circumstances keep conspiring to pull me from the things I enjoy, lately (long story).

The decision to use an already existing AIML set over building one from scratch will depend a great deal on whether you want your robot to have casual conversations with the user, or if you just want to process voice commands via the chat interface. It will also heavily depend on how much work you want to put into the conversational aspects of your robot. A lot can be said for having a robot that can carry on a conversation along with getting a beer (so long as it doesn’t nag about the beer, of course! ), but the extra effort involved is not insignificant.

Thanks Art and Dave for your help here.

I have contacted Steve Worswick and he kindly said he would offer me guidance it is most impressive that Steves Mitsuku won the Loebner prize!

The Pandorabots site offer some older AIML sets are their any newer that are available?

An interesting aspect is that I can add emotion sensing to the chatbot interaction - my face recognition sub-system sends back face(s) recognised, face coordinates, age, gender and emotion estimation. Here is a photo of the system off robot

http://i1177.photobucket.com/albums/x343/toymaker2/Face demo.jpg

With this the chatbot could understand exactly who it is communicating with (person, ages, gender and emotional state) and how they are feeling.

Tony

From the sound of it, you’re going to need some very specific and specialized AIML to be able to get the data from the various recognition engines (I assume the facial/object recognitions are run from different interfaces, given the evidence I saw on PhotoBucket), but that shouldn’t be difficult, really, so long as you can configure them to output specific text (for example, something like “RECOG FACE Tony AGE 57 GENDER male EMOT neutral”, or “OBJECT Coke can COLOR red”). For that first “input” to the chatbot interface the AIML category that handles is could look like this:

Of course, this is just example code, and as such, the phrasing is just to illustrate the concepts involved. I had originally put in something a bit more tongue-in-cheek (and a LOT less family-friendly) for the “angry” part of the response, but common sense won out over sophomoric humor.

Anyway, I thought I would toss in something to perhaps inspire you just a little.

Dave, thanks for your input here, it is much appreciated - I have go a lot to learn about AIML but I am starting to get it! I will be working on voice input and TTS output for the experimental EZ:1 chatbot. it should be fun using voice.

Has anyone else put a chatbot in an actual working robot?

Tony

I worked with William Hutchison’s project using AIML program AB in Java as an Android app. His robot used a galaxy notepad as the computer linked to the internet. It’s been a while since I heard from him. He used speech recognition and synthesis though. I think it worked pretty well. His robot was able to focus the microphone for the best speech recognition.

Thanks for that, Robby. I was thinking more or less along the same lines. With Program AB being written in Java, it’s almost platform independent, and with a bit of skill, could be used to interact with a lot of different devices and/or interfaces. Plus, with support for AIML 2.0, there is a much greater degree of flexibility, both on the input AND output side, since AIML maps and sets, as well as the ever-useful <oob> tag (which can be used to output command and control scripts).

As far as the AIML part of it, we were ALL new to it at one time, Tony. there are a lot of resources available to help with learning it’s ins and outs, as well as tools to aid in writing AIML code. One (admittedly primitive still) such resource is the AIML toolkit that I wrote a while back. It’s still a work in progress, but can at least allow for the creation of simple AIML scripts. I’ve had plans for a while now for creating a set of basic tutorials, as well as an interactive AIML reference manual, but I still have a long way to go with those. Still, you may find it useful.

Thanks Robby and Dave for the further information.

I am still a bit confused can at chatbot be made just with AIML 2.0 (and not Pandorabot) - I guess I would have to start from the beginning and teach it everything? Sounds like a lot to learn but it would be worth it!

Like you guys, there are some amazing people on this forum - it is incredible what talent is here.

I even more excited now about installing a good quality chatbot into the ALTAIR EZ:1 robot, it seems to me to be the perfect platform (host) for a chatbot.

I really appreciate everyones help and advice.

Tony

No worries, Tony. That’s why we choose to be here.

Hi Tony,

AIML is an XML data file. There are many engines available that carry out the chat process. Pandorabots does it online. Program AB is in Java. Program O is in PHP with MySQL database. One thing to note is that if you use Program AB as is, it has to load the AIML data every time it loads the AB program. But you can keep things small and simple like that. Program AB comes with an AIML dataset, actually more than one I think. It stores the AIML code in RAM so chat is fast.

Program O stores the AIML in a database so you don’t have a startup delay. I find this ideal for web pages, but storage is a consideration for any application. Program O comes with a sample AIML file that you can add to or change.

There are other AIML bot engines out there. PyAIML is written in Python. It is a bit older, not sure if it is being maintained currently. Dave works on the Program O source and programming I believe.

There should be links to other engines at http://www.alicebot.org That’s Dr. Wallace’s page. He created AIML.

As some of you know, I have been working on linking a Pandorabot with (unlimited) speech input and output, and have found a way to use the speech recognition in cortana.

With cortana SR input I can say anything I want to the chatbot as this video shows - its all a bit rough as it is one of my first (vocal) chats with DJ’s Pandorabot and I could not think of what to say!

Here is the video:

https://youtu.be/lfSZOD-wxkY

Tony

I like it Tony. Maybe speed the computer voice up just a little though?