RUBIOS
RUBIOS (RUBI's Operating System) is a Software Platform for Social Robots. It was originally developed at the University of California San Diego as part of the RUBI project . RUBIOS plays a similar role to that of other software platforms such as ROS, YARP, Player, CARMEN, Orca, MOOS, and Microsoft Robotics Studio. The focus of RUBIOS is on addressing computational problems faced by social robots. Arguably its main advantage is the fact that it is light, stable, and very easy to use.
RUBIOS is being currently used in a variety of research projects at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the University of Victoria, the University of Alberta, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and Hanson Robotics. It was used to drive the Hanson Robotics Einstein android demonstration on February 4 2009 at the TED conference. In all these cases RUBIOS provides easy interconnectivity between different software components, including face detection and tracking, expression recognition, emotion modeling, sound localization, visual saliency detection, speech recognition, speech production, and motor control.
RUBIOS is available for download at the UCSD Machine Perception Laboratory.
Communication Infrastructure
RUBIOS nodes communicate with each other via Master Relay Servers (MRS). These servers are "Chat Rooms" where collections of nodes can send messages to all the other nodes, or to a restricted set of nodes. In order to share messages a node needs to register with a MRS. Nodes can dynamically register and unregister at will. The MRS are built on top of QuickServer, an open source Java library/framework for robust multi-client TCP server applications. RUBIOS provides base classes in Java (and some in C++, Python, and Flash) to handle node registration and message passing in a transparent manner. A collection of example nodes is provided to handle common tasks such as message logging, animation blending, communication with the serial port, sound services, console services, interaction with Phidgets, open CV, real time plots, and starting/stopping external programs.
RUBIOS is available for download at the UCSD Machine Perception Laboratory.
See also
- ROS
- Microsoft Robotics Studio
- Webots
- URBI
- Turtle (robot)
- anyKode Marilou
- Robotics suite
References
[1] Tanaka F., Cicourel, A. and Movellan, J. R. (2007). Socialization Between Toddlers and Robots at an Early Childhood Education Center. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Vol 194, No 46, 17954 x17958.