The new robot has a modular and reconfigurable hardware and software design. The robot's hardware can easily be modified, e.g., to change the leg lengths or the feet or to add or remove sensors (e.g. to replace the current head with a single camera eye by a newly designed head with a stereo camera system) or to update the main PC104 computer board. If operated without the frame of the upper side of the torso even several PC104 boards may be stapled if large computing power is required. These are just a few examples of the many possibilities.
A new mini display on the robot's hip enables online monitoring and debugging of the robot's software. A new 100 MBit Ethernet interface at the robot's back enables debugging and monitoring also in cases when this is not possible by WLAN because of too large net traffic. A monitor can directly be connected to the robot for debugging. Two free USB slots enable to connect a large variety of devices directly to the robot, e.g., keyboard and mouse for direct programming of the robot or a second camera.
On the main PC104 computer either Linux or Windows CE can be used as operating system. Demo code in C++ is provided for basic operation of the robot's motion and sensing capabilities including how to communicate with the microcontroller board and how to access the camera and the mini display (under Linux and Windows CE). As open API, the C source code of the reprogrammable firmware for the microcontroller board is provided. The firmware provides the possibility to set and read any of the provided values of the joint servo motors and parameters as well as to read the values of the gyros, accelerometer and IR distance sensors. The source code will be open and can be reprogrammed and flashed to the microcontroller board using the flash development kit of the manufacturer which is available free of charge.
Finally, as we know very well from our experience about the value of a realistic, physics-based robot simulation we will provide not only the necessary data for kinematic robot simulation but also basic data for a kinetic robot simulation (like mass, main inertia and center of gravity for each body part).