Tekkotsu: A programming framework for AIBO

AIBO is a series of robot dogs created by Sony. As a social robot, it could potentially help people reduce anxiety. This project looks at how to program custom behaviours on AIBO in order to properly carry out the research.

Tekkotsu is a high-level application development framework for programming a series of mobile robots including AIBO. However, after AIBO was discontinued in 2006, Tekkotsu hasn’t been maintained or updated specifically for AIBO. Since then, many of its dependencies have been out of date and are incompatible with modern operating systems.

This project has explored how to get Tekkotsu 4.0.1 installed and compiled on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The steps have been documented in the tutorial listed below:

http://hci.cs.umanitoba.ca/assets/publication_files/2019Jason_Tekkotsu_4.0.1_Setup_Tutorial.pdf

Tekkotsu 4.0.1 needs to be run in either Ubuntu or Mac OS. Currently, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is the latest version that is compatible with the framework. For those who'd like to avoid the hassle of setting up the Ubuntu system and Tekkotsu framework, this tutorial provides a link to download the raw disk image of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with a working version of Tekkotsu 4.0.1 as well as instructions on how to restore this disk image in virtual machine software. For those who prefer to install everything from scratch, the tutorial shows how to install Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as an operating system and Tekkotsu 4.0.1. For those who already have Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installed, the tutorial gives instructions on how to install Tekkotsu 4.0.1 and compile an AIBO project.