I’m waiting for a small model tank to arrive in the post, so I can salvage the tracks. After that, I’m adding a servo-controlled scissors and then I need to find a wireless camera that sends in I2C so I can use one common communication technology instead of a load of separate ones.

An advantage to the desktop/mothership idea is that I can build a large laptop robot, which carries smaller slave bots around with it and disgorges them to do precise tasks that a larger bot would find difficult or cumbersome. The laptop would be the brain for the smaller bots.

I spoke with a guy in Trinity College who worked with them as well, and he had the same problem as me – he had to order directly from the American site, meaning that you’re not just paying for the board, you’re paying a huge P&P price as well.

The day that some crowd starts selling Gumstix in Ireland/UK, I’ll be a happy man.

The Computing Society here is looking into using those Gumstix chips to build a helicopter controlled with a xbox 360 controller, they might have some useful resources for you

to know where it is, it could use a combination of GPS to get a general position (accurate to about 15M) and Cricket for higher precision.

you teach the difference between plants using a neural network. here’s a simple javascript version which learns the difference between grass and concrete (eventually! – may seem easy to us, but is not easy for a computer). the same code can be used to learn the difference between dandelion and onion, for example.

I was envisioning having a “base station” – a “box”, maybe, which had the necessary power sockets and could do handy things like maybe empty out any gathered rubbish, etc.

point #3 involves lots of plastic bags

There /is/ a lot of work involved, but i think it’s worth it.

I think it’s impossibl… But then again I don’t know much about robots.. You would need a team of people to design the software alone. How could you teach a robot to recognize different plants?

I think that your biggest problem there would be the lack of a garden with plants Kae! Anyway it would need to have a couple of things to really work…

1. It would have to recognize where it is, so that it doesn’t go into your neighbours garden… Maybe that could be achieved by connecting it to your wi-fi. This would make it possible in the future to control it via the Internet.. Instead of using a remote you could use your laptop, even if your not at home!

2. It would have to be able to recharge itself via an outside plug, to be soely indipendant.

3. It would need to be both waterproof and wind resistant… In case it gets blown over.

As I said in my opinion it would require a hell of a lot of work to function decently.

Back on track though, can you abuse a Roomba? to get what you need?