The Chiara: A New Robotic Platform for Education and Research

The Chiara is a new robot designed for education and research, intended to fill the niche left by the Sony AIBO. It's a hexapod robot with an arm and gripper, a webcam on a pan/tilt mount, and a Pico-ITX processor (1GHz clock speed, 1GB RAM, and 80GB hard drive) that runs Ubuntu Linux. The robot is programmed in C++ using our Tekkotsu robotics software framework that includes an innovative ""dual coding"" vision system, a kinematics solver, and extensive teleoperation and monitoring tools. The Chiara was awarded the second place prize at the 17th Annual AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) Mobile Robot Exhibition in Chicago in July 2008, and is featured in a two-page article in the November/December issue of Robot magazine. It is being commercialized by RoPro Design, Inc., of Beaver, PA, and should be available for purchase by the end of the year. However, the design is entirely open source, both hardware and software, so users will be free to modify the robot or even make their own if they wish.