Years back, I was fortunate enough to find a Heathkit Hero in need of love. I spent many nights programming Hero to travel about my 1200 square foot basement, guard all my other toys, and scare the kids and wife while I was away on business trips.

Hero was quite well equiped with sensors. Sensors included light intensity, sound pressure, ultrasonic motion detection, ultrasonic ranging, single wheel encoder, Hex key pad, and time. Outputs included text to speech, tone, seven segment display, rotation of head and sensors, rotation of drive wheel direction, and of course rotation of the drive wheel.

My Hero only had four kilobytes of program memory. I programmed in assembly and system library functions. Hero did have some auxilliary circuits to drive motors and devices so multi-tasking was possible, such as turning head while rolling, or not having to wait till a sentence was fully spoken before execution could continue

My biggest gripe with Hero was that he could not recharge himself. Many nights were spent conceiving ideas for a homebase that Hero could interface to and various methods for finding the homebase, but the bottom line was that Hero was not smart enough to know where he was, to model his spacial environment or to plan to go anywhere.

Other negatives included slow travel speed, high center of gravity, excessive weight, slow processor speed, very long cycle to reset head and drive wheel directional sensors.

After Hero, I spent time working on autonomous flying vehicles that used 10 Sun Microsystems computers to fuse sensor information, model the environment, and plan flight paths. I still longed for a personal robot.

My list of most important features looks like:
 

Finds home base with high reliability and recharges without human assistance

Travels at variable speeds up to human walking pace

Senses obstacles to travel quickly

Able to traverse surface irregularities such as rug-tile transitions.

Ability to quickly determine position and orientation

When I found out about AIBO from Sony I got very excited. When I saw the price ($2500), found that it required a human to put it on its recharger, and an additional $500 for a simple minded programming kit, I decided to continue searching for a new personal robot. Since they offered a 10 day money-back period, I was tempted to sign up for it and then send it back, but all 2000 units were sold in a flash.

I continued searching and found CYE on the net.

Further info on CYE: More CYE