The robots used are I-Cybie robots from Tiger now distributed by Silverlit Electronic.
To allow the dogs to be reprogrammed, some hardware modifications are necessary: (cf www.aibopet.com)
Unlike AIBO from Sony, these robots haven’t been designed to be reprogrammed and a little operation is required…
1. a MAX232 (or 233) chip has been soldered inside the robot to allow the communication with the serial port of a PC (as well as a plug and a switch on his back). The shell of the robot is fully removed, the electronic is modified, the shell is customized and then reassembled.
2. an internal 2MB flash memory, that will contain the new program, has been added.
3. A boot loader has been installed to allow the robot to read the flash memory and to start on this new program instead of its original program, which is no longer used… all the movements have to be reprogrammed with the 16 motor drive (12 real servo for the paws, and 4 cc motors: neck, head, mouse and tail), as well as the sounds (ADPCM format, 8bit, sample rate: 8KHz), the light of its eyes (green, yellow, red) and all the sensors (3 touch sensors, 1 light sensor, 2 sound sensors,1 voice recognitions with 8 different commands, balance sensor (right, left, back, butt, face…).
4. Now, the program written in C on the computer can be downloaded through the RS 232 port thanks to the C232 cable which has been adapted to the robot (mini jack et USB power). ICSDK, Context and Terminal.exe are used to compile and download the C program into the robot via the serial port, and to communicate with it. Once the program downloaded, the robot can be disconnected from the PC, he is now autonomous.