The Leaf Project

A robotics project using artificial intelligence and vision

updated 7/28/07

    These are the first three robots in the Leaf family.

    From Left to right is Robin with her robot Mabel,  Bruce with his robot Leaf, and Alex with Rocky.

    All are equipped with microphones, speakers and webcam.  Bruce's robot shows the sophisticated CSLU animated face; and Rocky shows the simpler animation image.  In addition,  Rocky shows an image captured from his webcam.

    While Mabel and Rocky are almost identical twins,  Leaf shows how the basic architecture can be customized extensively.

          Meet Leaf, a short movie (1 MB)

    The Leaf Project is a group robot development program.  The objective is to develop a robot  platform that supports experiments with Artificial Intelligence, vision, navigation etc.  For more, see Objectives.

    Leaf began as an Artificial Life program that Bruce Weimer demonstrated at our robotics club, the Robotics Society of Southern California.  Bruce's artificial person, Leaf, was inspired by the computer game Creatures, by Steve Grand,  in which artificial beings hatch, develop, and interact in a simulated environment.  Bruce's creature included personality, response to spoken commands and vision.

    Alex Brown felt that it wasn't fair to keep Leaf locked up in a PC; he wanted to let him loose in the world.  Leaf needed a body.   He designed a simple platform supporting basic mobility, sensing and supporting control from an on-board PC environment. 

    Robin Hewitt provided a webcam implementation to give the Leaf bots vision and software to provide several visual capabilities including finding a homebase circle.  See her website for details (in Software/Vision)/

    Three such robots were completed in 2004 and can be seen in the picture above with their builders. Four more are running as of March 2006 (see Family Tree link below) and others are under construction.

    This is an open source project.  Use of existing software is limited to that which is commonly available or free.  All new development robot software is open source, free and fully documented.  Hardware designs are either fully documented or have enough information and advice for a builder to develop their own compatible designs.

    Building a large PC based robot is a big task for many of us, requiring learning a lot of new techniques.  We hope that this website will provide shortcuts to help others get starting building robots in the PC world.  For more on this project, check our mail list at:  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/leaf_an_AI_robot/

NEW!  (7/28/07)

    Updated Bruce's Lisp files in Software/Lisp to the latest official version (1/1/07).

Objectives:    What our goals are for this project

Overview:      A little history, current status and plans for the future

System Description:   A brief description of how it all works

Hardware:    Detail description of how the hardware was built and why

Electronics:    Detail description of electronic components

Software:    A description of all the software

Family Tree:    Descriptions and photos of Leaf robots

Leaf's Scrapbook:  Pictures of Leaf growing up.

Project Team:  Leaf's parents, creators, contributors 

Getting Started:  How to get started on your own Leaf bot.

Proprietary rights:   (or lack thereof)

Webmaster  Alex Brown  rbirac@cox.net