Wall-E, Robot in Love
Wall-E
Wall-E is an experimental free time project to study robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Is it possible, that machines will have intelligence and human like features like feelings, knowledge of themselves, own goals, etc, and these themes means. Project uses software, but it needs also hardware, but that hardware should be possible to buy for everyone and even more, better would be that it would be possible to use stuff you already have, reuse it, as Wall-E itself would do. We have Arduino project open source hardware and we have Raspberry Pi project, cheap card computers.
This is a good start for cheap hardware with sensors cameras and other capabilities Wall-E would need too fall in love.
We start with many views to this project. We start from most important matter: what is love and why should also robots fall in love.
Robotic love, why?
Simple answer is question: Why robots should pass easier than we men do? Live without women would be much easier. Look what happened to Wall-E when he met Eve.
Love is a thing we men can't handle. We will come robots without own will. We can't live without object of love.
And will change perceptive to the women's side, theirs live would be much easier without men. Agree? So if you are a woman, you can keep on reading more about this project, building a robot that can't control everything, a robot that makes mistakes, a robot that does not know everything, a robot that makes its best, a robot that don't know why acts silly, a robot that leans of it's mistakes, a robot that has memories, a robot that can understand associations, a very human robot, but not a perfect one.
Another answer is that this is fun project. Its fun to do this kind robot, much more to do, then try to do perfect doing robot in your free time. As a basic this is free time project.
Artificial intelligence
If we look current situation of machine learning, commercial project are focused to very narrow learning: commercial machine learning need much help about real human beings to learn. Those people are called 'robot whispers' that is helped with real people to learn. There are no robots that lean themselves. Commercial robots don't have knowledge of themselves. But basic meaning of intelligence is that you have knowledge what you are and you study that matter for whole of your life, from the birth to dying.
Opposite to commercial machine learning projects, we have a very ambition starting point, build real artificial intelligence so, that when we power up our robot out of the box, it does not know anything about it's environment, but it is willing to learn. It will start to collect associations about objects it sees and hears.
Human Software
It seems that we are implementing a model of human. So lets implement a human by software. We need memory, nerves, axons, sensors, sensations and muscles.
Intelligence by world wide network
Very basic theme in scifi films is machine intelligence that is implemented with computers that are talking to each other. OK, that is good thing to efficiency with many aspects. It is not needed to implement one perfect robot that can do everyting, but we can use hardware, that has something useful functionality. It is not needed to use expensive computers, but we can use anything useful we have. Its is not even needed to have hardware, but we can use also virtualized computers. We can use resources we have. It is also possible, that robots don't locate in same site but they are located in many places.
So dear reader, if you are interested, you can join to us, help us to build a human robot, that can fall in love. A robot that tries to understand what it sees and hears, identify things and peoples, tries to understand what people say to each other, what are the things a robot sees, etc.
Some basic software components
Sensation
Sensation implemented by software is a thing that carries information from sensors- meaning basically camera or microphone, but also sensors found from cell phones. Association will we implemented to make references between sensations. That way we ca make meaning between things, when we process them.
Memory level
When we sense things, sensing is very low level. We process things in a work-memory that can keep things in a memory very short time. When meaningful things are found, then we will want to remember things.
Muscles and Senses
To make things interesting, we need some hardware to implement capability for out robot to sense its environment. Basic things is camera. Our brains are done for processing visual things, so if we make a robot that mimics a human, then start with visual things, It will be a fun.
Implementation with python
We will implement this all stuff by python. Python is a programming language of science, it has build in libraries we need, it is easy to try things with python and make changes, when needed.
Libraries we need
Tensorflow
Tensorflow is for machine learning, used to classify images, trying to understand what things we can see in a pictures. It can be used also with sounds, I hope. With it we can get names of things our robot sees. We get higher level Sensations that reference to a image. This is a thing our robot will want to remember. When it sees same thing again, it will remenber that it has seen it before. It will be happier. So we must implement feelings also. We are much closer to implement a robot that can fall in love, aren't we?
Arduino
If we want to build a robot that can move or subrobot in our robot network if we remember that we want to use many independent devices implementing artificial intelligence, we need python library for arduino, pyfirmata
How to join to the project
All software is in the github. Nest release is coming, so be patient to get code, where all ideas are implemented explained above You can run it an environment with python3.
Virtual computer
I use Ubuntu virtual machine.
Raspberry pi
If you want to use real hardware with a camera, best choice is Raspberry pi with a camera, usb microphones and audio loud speaker. I use that also.
Arduino robot platform
If you wa't a robot that can also move, I use Arduino platform with it's some robot build in sets that can carry raspberry pi.
Use all stuff your already have
Remember that you can use all stuff your already have, like ald webcams, usb microphones, old hard disk, old loud speakers and new hardware can also be cheap. Original Wal-E in the film was a dirty old robot that reused old stuff. Look the picture in the beginning in this page. Old stuoff is cheap and old, but we can build a robot fron those particles, believe me! And it will be a fun.
Contact us
Contact us to choin our world wide network with Wall-E robots, so our can enjoy of the network intelligence and your don't need to start from beginning with associations your robot can recognize, but you can use world wide memories and associations our robots have carried. Contact to support.intelligentmachineaidedsystems@netti.fi for more information. Stay tuned!