Here is some info about the "Toroise" robot project -

The robot was originally designed and built to be used as a platform for AI research. The goals of the robot design fit in very well with the AAAI contest goals of real world human to robot interactivity so I decided at the last minute to enter the contest. The robot is built completely with inexpensive off the shelf hardware. The robot brain consists of four NetMedia BX24 microcontrollers connected in parallel. A recycled PC motherboard is slaved to the BX24’s and handles voice recognition and speech. The voice recognition software is a demo program from SensoryInc called Fluent Speech. The Fluent Speech software shows great potential for mobile robotics use although I did not have it working correctly at the contest due to a software bug. The Fluent Speech demo software is controlled by WinBatch software from WilsonWare. WinBatch allows me complete control over the Fluent Speech demo program which was not designed to be automated or used on a mobile robot.

About the robots name – Tortoise

The name was inspired from the fable of the tortoise and the hare. The robot is SLOW. Slow to move, slow to speak and slow to answer when spoken to. However I am working toward it being smart instead of fast. I have seen many neat and fast, mechanically impressive robots that are not very intelligent. My goal is just the opposite, to de-emphasize the mechanical and speed aspects of the robot and concentrate on the intelligent aspects like voice recognition and speech capabilities and ultimately artificial intelligence.

Mechanical

All the mechanicals were built with only a hacksaw and a drill. I used as many used, recycled parts as possible to save money. The robot has a single drive / steer motor with the drive motor a 12 Volt PM DC motor and the steering motor a stepper motor.

Speech electronics

PC motherboard – Pentium 166MMX overclocked to 233mhz, 2 ½" laptop harddrive, 64mb DRAM memory. The PC runs Windows 95 as the operating system and WilsonWare WinBatch (www.winbatch.com) software to control the speech programs and communicate to the robot BX24 microcontrollers. Speech is generated with an old speech to text program that came with an old Sound Blaster 16 sound card. Voice recognition software uses a demo program from SensoryInc (www.sensoryinc.com) called Fluent Speech. The Fluent Speech technology is cutting edge Speaker Independent, large vocabulary with high background noise immunity.

Microcontroller electronics

Four NetMedia R.A.D. (Rapid Application Development) BX24 ISP flash programmable microcontrollers (www.basicx.com) connected to operate independently in parallel. Programmed in the BasicX BASIC language. Each BX24 microcontroller utilizing an 8 MIPS Atmel AVR 8535 8 bit RISC microcontroller chip and 32k of EEPROM program memory.