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My girlfriend and I want to basically build a rover with humanoid/android torso. Sort of like an animitronic ontop of a roving base.
The FPGA stuff seems unreal complicated at first look. It is manageable I'm sure once you get your feet very wet and sit down with it for a few weeks. From what I read about FPGA's is that most robotics platforms are not using them and they are indeed overkill, and not really overkill in a good way (because who doesn't like overkill) but somewhat of a diversion to a more immersive experience where one gets more into the theoreticals of design and control regarding micro processor architecture. Or at least that's what a newb like me came away from it. On another blog someone said short and sweet "If you want a robot get a MCU or embedded PC. If you want to dive deep in computer robotics processor arhitecture and study that for years then get an FPGA." That sentiment was enough for me to start to think about other platforms rather than just throwing down a few hundred for a fancy FPGA.
That's basically what I'm doing too. I started out building something like a Johnny 5 (Or "Short Circuit"), but then decided I wanted a more human-like head. I'm already working on the track base (similar to Johnny 5), but now I'm also working on constructing a human head.
My first robot (if it ever gets built) will most likely just be the head running around atop the Johny 5 track base. I'll deal with adding arms and torso later. The whole project is just a journey into AI. My main goal is to build a robot that can actually do things and have some sense of what it's being told to do, etc. Precisely what it looks like is less important. But after looking at how much work so many people have been putting into traditional Johnny 5 heads I decided that I may as well go full-blown human-like instead.
But like I say, the AI programming is really the focus of my project. I want a robot that has some real smarts. At least as much as say a dog (or even better). After all, you can't talk to a dog in English, so the robot is already one up on a dog. You can tell the robot not to go out on the road and it will know what you mean. Sometimes that's hard to convey to a dog.