Intro

I have decided to build a robotic tortoise.  Yes, that's right, a robotic tortoise.  I've momentarily halted the pottery, photography, densitometer, and fossil collecting to start a completely new project.  For a while now I've had the idea of creating a small robot that would move around in my back yard and respond to stimuli.  It would avoid things that it was programmed to fear and be attracted to things that would help it sustain itself.  It would be solar powered and have a vast array of sensors attached to it.  The selected portions of the sensor data would be transmitted to a log on a laptop linked to the tortoise via my wifi, so that, at the end of the day, I could get an idea of what the robots day was like.  I imagine that a days log would consist of something like: a few photographs of some small animals that passed by, a tally of all of the fear responses for that day, a gps track of where the tortoise moved in the last 24 hours, and whatever else I think to add.  Assuming I maintain an adequate level of motivation on this project, I will continue to blog about my advancements as they occur.