Salvius's Brain

Salvius's brain is a network of microprocessors which receive and carry out various functions based on input from the robot's API. In other words, what follows will be some insight into the logic behind this collection of components housed in Altoids tins and held together with rubber bands. Salvius uses several controllers connected through I2C (two wire connections). An important feature of this network is that work is distributed over multiple processors, this provides many advantages. For example, if one of the controllers fails, it does not greatly affect any of the controllers. A hardware failure may cause the robot may loose the ability to speak or receive input, but the likeliness of multiple simultaneous errors is very low. The modular nature of this setup also makes it easy to add and remove controllers to the network.

A central nervous system

Similar to the robot's brain, a network of I2C compatible motor controllers receives commands from the brain and responds by carrying out a corresponding action. This is a lot like the central nervous system seen in animals which has some processing power of its own. At the moment, Salvius's central nervous system is limited to the movement of the head and arms, however work is in progress to extend motor control to the robot's legs.