What is TORP?

What is TORP?

The Open Robot Project (TORP - theopenrobotproject.org) is an initiative of (but not restricted to) a group of Brazilian robotics and artificial intelligence professors that aims to increase robotics knowledge sharing through the publication of the full project of robots that share a common philosophy (the TORP Specification Set). This initial group have started a project that encloses a initial robot project as well as standardization required to build a humanoid-like robot project.

Why TORP?

Robotics is a interdisciplinary research field with many dimensions: electrical, mechanical, computational, design and so on. To construct usable robots that properly deal with these dimensions has represented an extremely hard task in last decades. Some of the well known problems in the robotics field are:

• Lack of shared projects: When starting new robots projects, it is difficult to find rich and detailed data simply because there is a strong resistance from people to fully open their robots projects;
• Lack in reuse of parts: When constructing new robots, researchers and hobbyists usually restart their work (in all robotics dimensions) almost from scratch because it is usually very difficult to reuse previous robots boards or mechanics in new projects;
• Lack in sharing parts: For the same reason, it is now unthinkable that whole parts of a robot can be reused in a robot constructed by other person or group.

Mainly due to these reasons, the sharing of expertise between robotics researchers and hobbyists is very difficult. In this sense, TORP looks to fulfill these lacunes.

TORP Goal

The TORP main goal is to develop in next decade in a collaborative way a fully functional humanoid-like robot with multiple abilities (walk, run, communicate with humans, show emotional behavior, talk, recognize people, etc.), focusing on developing tools for sharing projects, parts, ideas and expertise.

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