Pleo's Processor
Getting Pleo to make purposeful movements and sounds starts with processing all of the input he receives. The eight touch sensors are a big source of information. Sosoka explains, "Each of [the touch sensors] has dedicated processing that they can do inside of a dedicated chip."
A separate processor in Pleo's head handles input from the area around that part of his body. Sosoka describes the processing power located there:
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Other processors help turn all this input into movement. Sosoka explains:
Pleo's final microprocessor, another ARM7 23-bit processor, governs Pleo's connections to computer data from the outside world. "It handles the SD card, it handles the USB, it manages the flash data," Sosoka says. This processor also acts as Pleo's overall brain. "It manages the talking to the head, talking to the motor controllers, it deals with kind of all the other stuff that's going on in there. That's where Pleo's personality and behavior exist."
On the next page, we'll look at how Pleo's body carries out these instructions, and we'll explore some of the challenges the development team discovered when working on Pleo's physical structure.