The CyberCity and it's "people"

CyberCity is a model. It can be described as the imitatioin of our future robotic lives. It is a model of a city with builduings, roads and crossings. It definitly also has people who live in there, the robots. There are mainly 3 kinds of robots. The cable robot, the Internet robot and the Display robot.

Cable robot is a simple robot which is made of wires, a control unit with a few buttons and the engine part with wheels. It is meant for the beginners, mostly children between 8-18, to build their first own robot and get an impression of how things work.

The Internet robots is actually the macMini equipped with webcams, wheels and other sensors. It is a standalone robots which can be controlled wireless. These robots can be controlled over cities, countries and even continents. It is locally connected via wifi and it is further connected via Skype to it's destination.

The Display robot is a high quality audio video robot which works only loaclly. The audio and video are HD.

The Cybercity will be put into show and use in two large exhibitions at Essen and Shanghai which both will take place in 2010. So until then the project should be succesfully done.

Different people will be workig on the project.

Annelies Wisse is a student at the university of TU Delft. She is doing her masters on Industerial Design. She will be working on the interface of the robots and other design/interface aspects. This is her thesis project. I met her, Stella Boess and Aadjan van Helm at the Univerysity of TU Delft at the kick off on monday the 7th of september. Aadjan is Annelies' mentor and Stella is the chair at the university.

There are also two other students from the HKU(Hogeschool voor Kunsten Utrecht) who will be working with us.

My main function in this project is to program and adapt the existing code of WebChair project which is written in Java. Robbert Smit will supervise me during my stay at WebChair/Presence Displays.

At the moment I am looking how to solve the problem of managing of the robots. Momentarily, if anyone logs int the robot, he will be controlling it unlimited. So this should be solved in a way to limit it so more people will be able to use it. I think I am going to put a loging system before the control unit which will control the program in a new Thread upto the given time.