Latest Pleo Hack With Facial Recognition

It seems that Pleo has not only been a cute toy for kids but also something for the newbie robotics engineer can get their teeth into. A team of, not-so-newbies, at the Otto-Friedrich University in Bamberg, Germany has shown how to connect Pleo wirelessly to a remote computer and give him the power of facial recognition.

Looks mighty painful if you ask me!



Right, here goes, I'll try and explain it. A small XBee module is connected to an internal serial port which allows you to send diagnostics back to the pc. The PC will then analyse them and send info back to Pleo. The team also attached a higher resolution camera to replace Pleo's own one which allowed it to perform pattern-recognition in real time.

Cracking if you ask me!