SKIRMISHER

Robert Oschler takes a break from his endless tweaking of his cool robots to bring us the news of how Nintendo’s Wii controller can be used to make the iSobot do fancy things, as you can see in this video.

All this is made possible through the use of Robodance 4, a free Windows-based robot control software. If you already own an iSobot, you might wanna know that Robodance 4 has these features.

* A “pre-test” version will be out before Christmas, by December 23 of this year. While somewhat lacking in polish and sporting a fair number of bugs, it is fully functional. The formal release will be the end of February 2008, but if you’re adventurous and would like to help test Robodance 4’s WiiMote support and gesture recognition capability, you can get that chance in about a week.

* Allows you to control an i-SOBOT robot using the WiiMote’s buttons for directional movement and WiiMote + Nunchaku controller gestures for combat commands (Gesture Recognition).

* Has gestures for all 35 of i-SOBOT’s combat commands (Punches, Kicks, and Guards). The system uses an advanced data transformation system that feeds a neural net classifier that is doing the pattern recogntion task necessary to classify the gestures.

* Has a complete virtual training room with videos for each gesture complete with scoring system. The training room is completely controllable using just the WiiMote so you never have to sit down to touch the keyboard or mouse during practice. Each gesture has its own video showing you how to execute the gesture properly, with an accompanying video showing the robot doing the associated movement.

* Any command in i-SOBOT’s command set can be attached to one of the WiiMote’s buttons. Scripts can be triggered by the buttons too. Also, scripts are interactive and you can pause a script to take temporary control of the i-SOBOT, perhaps to line him up to pick something up or punch a friend, and then have the script resume at a button press.

* Skype integration. At the moment, this feature which was demonstrated previously in a sneak peek video involving a WowWee Roboquad robot, is a bit tricky to set up. I intend to smooth out the setup process by the time the formal release happens (see links below).

* The voice control system gives you voice control over all 147 of i-SOBOT’s commands (157 minus the 10 built-in voice commands that i-SOBOT has.

* You can control multiple robots.

* When controlling multiple robots, the scripts running for each robot can interact and send messages to each other, creating a very entertaining illusion of interaction between robots.

Stumble it!