Here is what I have been up to the past 4 weeks (in chronological order from oldest to newest):
- Got serial data (from BubbleBoy’s LDR) to go into Matlab very easily
- Read lots of robot books
- Wrote a paper on the ethical dilemmas of the 3 Laws
- Got iRobot to work (drive in a straight line)
- Got MANOI to walk
- Worked on a presentation for the paper
- Programmed MANOI to shake hands for the presentation (and I did this like 5 hours before the presentation and had a potential disaster, but it worked in the end)
- Worked on a cookie mover robot
- Got a CMU cam
- Ran a Girl Scouts Robotics Activity (cookie mover robot)
- Working on a MATLAB program for BubbleBoy that can make it speak, play songs on iTunes, use AI
- Working on a Processing sketch that displays RSS feeds, nicely

That’s 12 blog posts that I have to write! They are all really cool too… I think the programming MANOI to shake hands will be the funniest blog post.

This also means that I have achieved a goal that I have had for 3 years… MANOI can walk!

I’m also continuously working on improving my code from the summer that socializes a social robot using an artificial society. One of the main differences is that in the summer it only worked for 1,000 iterations. Now the program can do over 1 million iterations… until infinity! So I have to make the patterns more evident and last longer… which is a trial and error thing, really.

More later!

There are a few things that I want to talk about in this entry… so here goes!

1. Styrobots – I’ve had 2 Styrobots up on Etsy since May 17th! They’re only $20, and the money goes towards my Robotics Fund, which will go towards my Stanford EPGY AI Program tuition, or to books and parts. They are irresistibly cute, so if you can, please buy one! I’ll be adding more this weekend, assuming homework doesn’t attack me (there is a good chance that it will and may)
2. Rube Goldberg Project – I have been working with my friend to build this immense Rube Goldberg project! The purpose was to light a candle. Here are some pictures of it…
   

   t="97" alt="Project at school" class="imageframe" />

   There was a problem though, whenever I tried capturing it on my camera, the candle would not light. However, when the camera was off, it would light! When we brought it to school, it didn’t light. It felt like an immense waste of time, considering we had so much and we couldn’t even fulfill the objective. I liked building it, but I didn’t like setting it up. Hopefully this knowledge will be useful, someday!

3. 507 Mechanical Movements – This book looks very interesting, I should buy it after I buy Cynthia Breazeal’s book ‘Designing Sociable Robots’
4. Remember that Paper Cylon contest that I made a robot for? Turns out it’s only for US Residents. Lame! Haha, at least I tried though.
5. Homework. There’s a lot of it! It’s reducing my rate of productivity. (Go figure)