Possible features that could be supported in our application were canvassed
among the whole of group B. Suggestions included:
Camera
This could be used in two ways -
Feeding a video stream back to the user via the WWW.
Local Image Recognition - software on the robot could recognise shapes
such as a ball that could then affect the 'mood' of the pet or stimulate
responses such as to follow the ball.
Speaker
This would allow the robot pet to play sounds. These
sounds could come from two potential sources:
Sound Archive
This would store various sounds such as barks and
growls.An additional feature would be the ability to download sounds over the
bluetooth link that could update the sound archive.
Text to Speech Engine
A software text to speech engine could
run on the robot pet to 'speak' messages it either generated itself or that
were sent to it over the bluetooth link.
Microphone and Voice Recognition Engine
A microphone and Voice
recognition system could be incorporated on the robot to allow a degree of
direct interaction.
Basic Navigation
A system that recorded its movements relative
to its previous positions, so that on various stimuli it could return to base,
and possibly avoid objects it had learned about.
WAP interface
A WAP interface would allow greater access to the
control interface, especially if the control commands are relatively low
bandwidth.
SMS messaging
The robot pet could call the base station to send
an SMS message to the user when it was in a certain 'mood' for example if it was
hungry or in playful.
Lifelike random movement
The robot pet should move
pseudo-randomly and not in direct straight lines. I.E. it should move like a dog
and not like a lego robot.
Bluetooth pico-net Awareness
The robot is a bluetooth device that
can move around so at times it may come within range of new bluetooth devices.
It should be able to interact with these devices (if they accept a connection of
course). An example would be that if a robot pet was playful and was in a room
with a bluetooth aware TV or Games platform the pet could oppen a connection to
one of them and attempt to get the user to play with it.