AIBO is a Sony Entertainment robot designed as a companion and used also in many academic projects. Using this robot, I made a small project with my friend Galtarossa Umberto.

With AIBO, Sony provides a particular software (called AIBO PERFORMER) that you can use to program the dog movements. Unfortunately this tool is very poor and you can do only a few things; if you want to use some advanced features you can use a program language called R-CODE. This language works only with ERS-1xx, in fact for the newer AIBO versions it is possible to use a more powerful language called OPEN-R.

R-CODE let you use procedures, the stack, cyclic statements, and also some system variables to manage the information about the robot status. Obviously with this language is possible to move the robot and also to do an object tracking, that means to recognize an object and to look at it while moving. AIBO ERS-1xx recognize an object only for its color, so two objects with different shape but the same color are recognized as the same object. This behaviour happens only with ERS-1xx because in the newer Aibo versions they improved the object recognition process.
With R-CODE it's also possible to recognize some sounds like the melodies produced by the AIBO remote control.

Through our project we only wanted to give a short demonstration about the AIBO features and to build some small robot behaviours.
During our work we used not only the programs given with AIBO but also others tools downloaded from internet and developed by AIBO fans. We used these tools to execute some advanced procedures like capturing the images taken by the AIBO camera and showing the emotions that AIBO feels when it views some colors.

We made some behaviours using the AIBO sensors and many R-CODE commands to show different features like:

• melody recognition
• object distance computation
• object tracking

You can also download the source code of the three behaviours we made using the R-CODE language:

Demo I	Demo II	Demo III

Furthermore, we made a small program to create an AVI video using the images captured by the AIBO camera. This software (called AiboVideoMaker) uses the output given by another tool (called AiboScope) downloaded from AiboHack Site.
It is possible to see what our dog saw during some experiments made during our project: these videos have been made using our AiboVideoMaker tool.

At university	In our college

If you need more informations you can download the project presentation (in italian) and also the project manual (in italian).