This document summarizes the basic technical and practical knowledge that was gained during the first EPFL semester project using Sony’s robotic dog Aibo ERS-210. It is intended for other students doing a project with Aibo and provides help to get started quickly and to avoid certain pitfalls.

The starting point of every Aibo project should be the official web page [OPEN-R]. The first goal of the project will certainly be to get Aibo up and running and to install the OPEN-R SDK on a PC. For the first EPFL Aibo project an Aibo ERS-210A equipped with an ERA-201-D1 wireless LAN card was used. The workstation was a Linux PC with an IEEE 802.11b compliant wireless LAN card installed. Working with the OPEN-R SDK is more straight- forward in a Linux environment, because on Windows platforms Cygwin has to be used in plus. Development is also possible with the Mac OS X operating system, but there are some limitations, i.e. Remote Processing OPEN-R will not work. [Install] provides more information on supported platforms.

The OPEN-R SDK allows the cross-compilation of programs that will be executed on Aibo. The resulting binary files have to be transfered on a special Sony Memory Stick which is then plugged into Aibo. Despite the fact that Aibo is principally sold as an entertainment robot system, it has powerful capabilities such as wireless network communication, a wide range of input and output devices such as speaker and microphone, color camera, distance sensor, acceleration sensors, various touch sensors and of course controllable joints and LEDs.

The procedure applied to set up everything thats is necessary for OPEN-R development on a Linux system is described in the following paragraphs and links to useful documents are provided. Installation on Mac OS X is very similar. Detailed instructions for the installation on a Windows system can be found in [Install]. Nevertheless, this document still contains a lot of useful information valid for all development environments.

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