Our Philosophy

HeadThere is committed to the open source development model. Our software source code will be available to the public. While we hope to profit through the sale of our robotics hardware, we believe that a future world of robots will only happen if the whole world contributes. If you're as excited about the future of robotics as we are, we encourage you to contribute in any way you can.

Sign Up

We will be releasing our code to the public in the near future. Thank you for you patience. In the mean time, please add your name to our notification list, and we'll keep you in the loop! You might also want to stop by our forums.

The Details

The HeadThere Giraffe is built around a VIA Mini-ITX main board running at 1Ghz. The video conferencing and intercommunication software runs on this board.

Our video conferencing capabilities are derived from the OpenWengo video phone project. Currently H.263+ video compression with QCIF resolution is supported. Feature improvements will be merged in from the OpenWengo project as appropriate.

Our UI and motion control high-level software is written primarily in Java, with some hooks to OpenWengo (in C++) as appropriate.

Low-level motion control and sensor feedback is accomplished on a separate AVR micro-controller which communicates with the VIA mini-ITX board through a serial bus interface.

We plan to offer a limited number of Giraffe's at discounted prices to developers. Because we can't afford to supply more than a limited number of these discounted units, we must ask for a detailed explanation of what project you plan to undertake, and what qualifications you have.

Possible projects for developers: Improved video, Stereo hearing, object recognition, face tracking, hooks to open source robotics tool kits, and automatic door frame traversal.