There's a lot of separate things and a lot of words in my responses so I split them up in to more than one post below:
Well, the computer(s) won't be in the robot itself (they'd probalby catch fire inside the heat-insulating furry body!***), and since this version of the project is essentially for a relatively stationary robot (imagine a big old tired lazy dog that just lays on the bed and waits for you to get home, then snuggles, plays, etc., all just right there in one place or limited area, it doens't need to be battery powered either.
Since I would like all the noisy motors and stuff outside the robot wherever possible, I'm already going to have a (probably large) umbilical of push/pull cables from skeleton/etc out to the actuators, and so power for any of the internal electronics (sensors, first-level MCU processing, speakers, etc). would come via a cable within that bundle, too.
Later I'd love to develop something that could actually follow me around or even be portable and "self powered", but I dont' actually need that.
***In the 90s I worked on desiging a wolf-shaped computer case, but I couldn't come up with anything other than liquid cooling that passed the refrigeration tubes out to something large and external that would let the computer inside function for more than a few minutes; IIRC it was a dual-P90 with WinNT when I started, I think I'd moved to Win2000 and some newer CPU/etc by the time I concluded it just wouldn't work without the external stuff that would be about as big and noisy as a regular computer tower, and dropped the idea, since all this was for my music-recording home-studio stuff, and I already could easily make a regular computer case nearly silent.
Ok. I don't yet know how to do this stuff, or which things are good for what. So whatever alternatives you (or anyone else) can think of for processing this data, I'm up for trying out.There's really no need to use modeling for the position of limbs. I guess I left out that neural networks are incredibly slow when compared to old school methods, like formulas and equations. Even if the hardware were able to keep up, the video card in my desktop uses up to 350 watts of electricity to do what it does -- which is more than half the average watts of my ebike (500).
Granted, you could have a pretty big battery in a St. Bernard sized body, but it wouldn't last much longer than a short nap I don't think.
Well, the computer(s) won't be in the robot itself (they'd probalby catch fire inside the heat-insulating furry body!***), and since this version of the project is essentially for a relatively stationary robot (imagine a big old tired lazy dog that just lays on the bed and waits for you to get home, then snuggles, plays, etc., all just right there in one place or limited area, it doens't need to be battery powered either.
Since I would like all the noisy motors and stuff outside the robot wherever possible, I'm already going to have a (probably large) umbilical of push/pull cables from skeleton/etc out to the actuators, and so power for any of the internal electronics (sensors, first-level MCU processing, speakers, etc). would come via a cable within that bundle, too.
Later I'd love to develop something that could actually follow me around or even be portable and "self powered", but I dont' actually need that.
***In the 90s I worked on desiging a wolf-shaped computer case, but I couldn't come up with anything other than liquid cooling that passed the refrigeration tubes out to something large and external that would let the computer inside function for more than a few minutes; IIRC it was a dual-P90 with WinNT when I started, I think I'd moved to Win2000 and some newer CPU/etc by the time I concluded it just wouldn't work without the external stuff that would be about as big and noisy as a regular computer tower, and dropped the idea, since all this was for my music-recording home-studio stuff, and I already could easily make a regular computer case nearly silent.