Software engineer turned roboticist.

Hi Everyone, im Anupam and I'm new here. Spent most of my life as a software engineer working on computer graphics in the video game and movies business. Now I really want to get more into Robotics/AI and my interest there is extremely varied from mechatronics, control systems, perception and planning. Thats what I think is really amazing about robotics is that it combines so many disciplines together and you have to touch all these areas to make a system work as a whole. DroneBot workshop has by far some of the highest quality content I have seen and I hope this channel grows. Its also a lot of work to create this content so if there is an avenue to where i can contribute some funding to keep things going I'm happy to donate.

So whats my project:

I figure id just throw myself into the fire and start with a very ambitious project. Some of you may know of a little robot called the Cosmo made by Anki. Its a little bot with a lot of personality and I really think they were on to something great. Unfortunately consumer electronics is a hard biz to be in and they ran out of cash and closed down shop. What id like to do is build a robot kind of like Anki that has incorporates snappy "pixar animation" like movement, along with some simplistic facial tracking and recognition and share my journey here. My strengths are software, but when it comes to hardware boy do I wish I got a degree in electrical engineering instead. That being said I can cobble together some adafruit/sparkfun boards and get stuff to work so thats where I am now. I certainly dont have a PHD in robotics from CMU, but im of the mindset that anything can be learned if you work hard and never give up. So here goes!

I will likely be posting quite a bit here on various topics regarding this project. There are so many areas to cover but for now I will be focusing on motor control and move up from there. I hope we can learn from each other. Glad to be here and hope to get to know some of you!

-Anupam Das

ps: here is a really great deep-dive into cosmo and its inner workings: