Achilles 1999

For the Intelligent Robotics degree course, in a team of three, we constructed, built and programmed a robot to navigate around the robotics laboratory and greet any people it found, rather than tables and chairs! We named him Achilles.

Achilles is a friendly robot that use a sonar sensor to "see", as it moves, it scans left and right looking for people's legs. If it finds two legs, it looks up to try to see the body they are supporting. If it finds a body, Achilles offers its hand to shake a greeting. As only humans shake hands, the robot then learns the characteristic widths of legs over time.

Achilles' brain was a Handy Board and it was programed using a variant of the C language, Interactive-C.