Scope#

Are the kinds of robots to be discussed restricted? E.g., do we want to include Lego robots, etc.?

No, but we're trying to focus on "personal" robots and how to build and program them, so ready-made kits (where there's no hardware or software questions really to resolve) seem a bit out of scope, but might prove valuable as introductions into more "personal" robots. We should try to be as inclusive as possible, and foster invention and experimentation. Maybe have categories or scales of development...

We shouldn't rule out Lego and the various pre-built robots, as there will be programming challenges, but the focus is on building and testing new hardware and software.

The scope would not include commercial or industrial robots, or anything beyond the scale of private individuals or teams to build. These are meant to be "personal" robots in that sense. We can hilight existing commercial, industrial or scientific robots on the wiki to better understand how various challenges have been met, but nobody in Pukerua Bay is going to build an actual Mars rover.

Interestingly, the NASA Sojourner robot used an 8 bit 80C85 processor running at 2MHz with 64K of RAM, 16K of PROM, 176K of non-volatile storage, and 512K of temporary data storage. This wasn't the most powerful computer available in 1997, and is a lot less capable than a Raspberry Pi. This demonstrates that NASA doesn't look at raw CPU power as the most important aspect of the controller in a robot. Sojourner communicated with PathFinder, its base station. It never travelled further than 10 metres from PathFinder, which provided its communication to earth.