The electronics was designed to support a large number of possible uses of the robot in a context of university level education. The following structure has been implemented in the actual version:

Short description of the main components around the processor:

• Single power supply. All electronics runs at 3.3V, excepted the camera needing an additional 1.8V.
• An extension connector allows to add new functionalities on an extension board.
• The robot is equipped with a RS232 and a bluetooth interface to communicate with a host computer.
• A 16 positions rotating switch allows an input from the user, for instance to set a running mode.
• Reset button and programming connector as usual.
• The battery is based on LiION technology, has 5Wh capacity and is sufficient for about 2-3 hours of intensive use. The battery can be removed and recharged externally. A battery protection is implemented.
• 8 IR proximity sensors are placed around the robot but not in a regular way (more sensors in front of the robot).
• A 3 axis accelerometer is placed inside the robot.
• Three microphones and a speaker allow sound capture and generation.
• A camera with a resolution of 640x480 color pixels is placed inside the body and looks forward.
• Can be used only through windowing or subsampling.
• 8 red leds are placed around the robot body to diplay patterns.The camera should be able to see them.

Processor

The choice of the processor is crucial for this robot. To enable nice programming, use of standard compilers (GNU) and have good computational power we made the choice of the dsPIC family from microchip. This microcontroller has a lot of very nice interfaces and has a dsp core allowing very efficient data processing. It is a very nice processor for education because of the nice structure (registers, set of instructions).