OVERVIEW OF MY LATEST ROBOT
I’ve recently completed my second revision of my newest line of robots. This robot is special for a number of reasons, many of them in it’s physical features, but the most powerful in the ability of the robot to use what I call the “Reverse Matrix”. (Read the post of reverse matrix to understand exactly what that is, but in short, it’s the ability for the robot to send it’s objectives to a virtual world that copies the structure of the robots physical environment. Then, in the virtual world, multiple clones of the environment will be used by multiple virtual representations of the physical robot until the objective is solved in the most optimal way. At that point, the actions and information needed for the robot to carry out those actions is uploaded from the virtual world into the robot where the robot will then carry out the actions in the physical world.)
The newest robot may even appear as if it’s devolved a bit due to the lack of arms the previous version had, the shorter size, and the overall simplification of the new robots geometry, as we’ve gone from a more humanoid appearance to a simple set of two rectangles and a rod for a neck (see image gallery below for comparison visually). However, the de-evolution is an illusion, as the new design has resulted in the best balance, largest weight capacity, longest battery life, smallest weight and ease of access for modifications and serviceability. In fact, I will probably get rid of the rod for the neck soon and just stack the face rectangle on the lower rectangle to increase stability, or, I may make the head much lighter and just use a small display as we did in the previous version with a light-weight, plastic (currently the robot is all aluminum for max durability) casing around the display to give the face and head more personality. This robot is much easier to build than the previous version, exponentially easier to build, but there are still many things that can be done to make it even easier to mass produce.
The robot does have a few hidden features, not seen by visual inspection in the robot’s default pose, such as, a single finger robot arm that comes out above the top handle directly under the neck, speakers, microphones, and the head is moveable to point it at a target, such as the person talking to it, or the object it is interacting with or what it is imaging, etc… This robot is about 3.5 feet tall. This robot is not using a gaming desktop, and instead uses a much lighter, portable, Nvidia Jetson X1.
The New Robot 
The Previous Robot
NEXT STEPS
Other then the changes to the head and neck discussed above, I will probably add one or two robot arms back onto the left and right sides of the body. I’ve even considered adding four arms to it, one on each side mounted in the center of each panel. In addition to the physical aspects, the reverse matrix features (see my other post on reverse matrix) will continue to be advanced, and all new progress on machine learning and artificial intelligence in general, where applicable, will be integrated into the robot’s capabilities. Currently, the robot’s body is created using custom aluminum panels on top of 80/20 aluminum building kits for the frames. That will be replaced with a combination of 3D printed parts, aluminum parts cut from my Wazer (water cutting laser), and vacuum formed parts from my vacuum form machine. I have also been optimizing the latest raspberry pi v4 with 8GB RAM using neural compute sticks to provide neural network capabilities without taxing the Pi’s limited resources. Being able to operate from a low cost, highly available, raspberry pi, and 3D printed/vacuum formed/metal cut parts, will open the road to an easily accessible and constructable, highly capable, robot. And this works well for some of my future plans (which involve robots creating other robots and using AI that advances beyond it’s starting state through emergent action and approach generation. {See my self-improving AI post for more information on emergent capable AI. The creation of this new kind of AI is currently my greatest achievement.}).
