Advee: Petr = false till 26th

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi guys,

we are entering peak crunch time with project at work which will be presented in public on 25th and 26th, so till that time I will probably not be able to react in time here on forum.

Please keep your fingers crossed everything goes as it should :), I will supply then some photo and other material which might be of interest.


Thanks for understanding,
Petr

[ErosOlmi]

The best for your your project, Petr.
And have ... some sleeping every now and then if you can :)

[Michael Hartlef]

Yeah, best wishes for your project.

[Petr Schreiber]

Dear friends,

I am back home, still not fully recovered, but I thought some of you could be interested in what we presented in Prague and how we ended.

The mysterious product was our robot "Advee", designed to be of assistance for promotional activities (product propagation) and also as guide (in museums, various kinds of congresses, exhibitions).

It is approximately 1,60m tall, it is equipped with 2 brains(Linux PC+Windows PC), 1 eye, ears are used to speak :). Then there is large touch screen, printer, ultrasound sensors for obstacle avoidance and custom localization system. With all this equipment he is still able to stay alive for about 12 hours, while moving completely autonomously in the environment, safely avoiding obstacles and trying to make people interested in what he propagates.

We have been working on this beast for last two years very intensively and ThinBASIC was plugged in our pipeline all the time for previsualisations and generation of animations the robot uses to communicate with the user.
ThinBASIC was also used to prototype the 3D map interface.

The robot can play video, show schedule, localize itself and tell you where are you on the map of the area and what is interesting around... He speaks to you and comments your choices, the comunication human->robot is done via touch screen. Robot itself talks Czech and English, but other languages can be added as the architecture is data driven.
You can play 2 games I coded for the robot, and if you win, you get personalized discount coupon for advertised product with your face.

It is quite hard to describe, better to see it "live". I think the next year you will see Advee mainly in Czech Republic, but if it will go well... who knows :cool:

We headed to Prague to take part in POPAI Awards competition which is focused on advertisement resources. We hoped to get prize in "hi-tech" category, in the end we did not get only this prize, but also one for "creativity" and "best material and technical inovation" of the show. So better than expected, which is always nice.

Once we returned from Prague, we had already another action on Brno trade fairs connected with electrotechnics and electronics expo called Amper.

To not bore you with details and spam with marketing info, I stop talking here and attach hyperlink, where you can watch photos from the event and the robot itself:
http://advee.eu/gallery.html

I would like to tell more on how thinBASIC was used in some future blog post/article, but before that I need to get some reasonable amount of sleep, as this activity was not possible very much in the last weeks :)


Petr

P.S. The Microsoft logo is on Advee because he was set up to promote Kinect at the moment, but the robot is not Microsoft product.

[Charles Pegge]

Congratulations Petr,

I hope this is the start of many successful robotic enterprises.

Charles

[sblank]

Fantastic Petr... best wishes in your robotic project!

Stan

[matthew]

Hi Petr, congratulations on all the awards. :)

I see that Advee has even got his own page on Facebook here (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001854376294). :cool:

[ErosOlmi]

Great Pert, great.
Ride the wave. There are not much of such systems around.

[Michael Hartlef]

Congratulations for the awards. Make sure you guys use that momentum to hit it off commercially.

[kryton9]

Congrats Petr! The photo is really cool of Advee.
I am worried Advee might become split personality with Linux and Windows OS's. Who is the dominate persona?

[zlatkoAB]

That is really cool ... :)
Congratulations Petr...

[Petr Schreiber]

Thanks a lot guys,

the split personality ... it should not occur. Linux handles the critical stuff like sensor collection and planning (safe autonomous movement), while Windows handles the personality itself (user interaction).

Both PCs are connected to single elastic wire backbone, so he should not become crazy. But who knows... :p

We will try to ride the wave (already a tsunami from the feedback we got), on Wednesday there will be presentation for 3 different subjects, so... Advee won't get bored :)


Petr