History

For many years, a group of Brazilian robotics and artificial intelligence professors and researchers developed and idea of manufacturing robots with particular characteristics. In this group there were, particularly the following researchers : Alexandre da Silva Simões, Esther Luna Colombini, Marcelo Nicoletti Franchin and Jackson Paul Matsuura. For this group, to finish a robot project and, after, to start another completely different robot project did not seem the best thing to do. Something should be done in order to allow the robot's parts reusability in large scale and also to stimulate the expertise sharing in high size robotics projects.

The initial idea of an open source robot and architecture started to take form in 2008. it represented a fully Open Robot - inspired in open software initiatives like Linux - that was developed and named "The Open Robot Project". After this, many groups, like the Brazilian Open Source community, Brazilian univiersities like UNESP and ITA and researchers from important Brazilian Societies like Brazilian Computing Society (SBC) and Brazilian Automation Society have joined the initiative. It is important to notice that some open robot initiatives were born in the past around the world, like the Open Pino, for example. However, in the point of view of this group, the idea of an open robot project was not enough. It was necessary to develop a reusable and plug-and-play structure with a strong on-line participation of the community in order to allow the development of the robot in all its dimensions: electrical, mechanical, computational and also design. The idea was finally ready to born and the first drafts of an specification were made. There was missing a way to construct the first TORP robot.

The opportunity to physically construct this robot arrived by the end of 2008 due to a singular partnership between the researchers group and the E3 Futura company, the international promoter of the Campus Party that sponsored all required material (mechanical and electrical parts). In honor to this partnership, this first robot constructed using the TORP Specifications was named CP01, in a reference to Campus Party. CP01 was designed to be fully assembled and programmed inside of Campus Party Brazil 2009. For more details regarding CP01, please visit the CP01 page.

We strongly expect that after some years of development, with the development of new modules and new versions of this first draft robot, the TORP initiative can help us to learn how to develop better robots for human needs.

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