Working with the Pleo Platform

Pimp My Pleo

According to the brochure, Pleo is an "artificial lifeform" produced by Ugobe. Pleo is a robot with the shape of a small dinosaur. The explicit aim of Pleos developers was to build a robot that interacts especially on the emotional level with its owner. This relatively new approach to human-robot-interaction makes Pleo an interesting platform for scientists working in this field.

Instead of keeping the technology behind Pleo closed, Ugobe encourages the Pleo-community to work with Pleos hard- and software. Hence, here we present two tutorials to increase Pleos possibilities of interaction and orientation.

Pleo Spycam Hack

An "out-of-the-box-Pleo" has a built-in camera to allow basic pattern recognition. Within the Pleo community the possibility of face recognition and face tracking has often been mentioned. In our oppinion, it is not realistic to use just the actual hardware: On the one hand, the resolution of the camera is to low and the already weak image quality gets even worse by the small Plexiglas-window in front of the pinhole lens. On the other hand, the built in 32-bit NXP ARM 7 sub processor may have too litte calculation power to perform complex real time pattern recognition such as face detection. So we came up with the following solution: We use a small RF-spy cam to transmit image data to a PC where it is processed. The PC sends the control commands back to Pleo via RF (s. XBee Hack). Here you get the tutorial.

XBee Hack

Pleo has two serial ports: One inside with Bluetooth preparation and one next to its power switch under a small plastic coverage. Via these ports you can get information on the actual internal state of Pleo and send commands to control Pleos reactions.
A XBee Module can easily replace the serial cable from Pleo to the PC via a RF-connection. The described XBee hack is based on a first version of PleoPet. Without his help, this tutorial would not have been possible. Thank you very much!