Science / Technology / Robotics

Robotics

“Rossum’s Universal Robots” - a 1920 Czech play, likely coined the term “robot”, specially in reference to an artificial being that was humanoid in form. In the over a hundred years since, the concept of a robot has continued to spark the imaginations of individuals within fields of both science and fiction alike.

Exhibit 1 of 1: Salvius #

Salvius is a humanoid robot built predominantly from recycled materials.

The project was started around 2013, mostly as my way to learn about robotics, work with popular hardware like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards, and to share what I was building with people. One of the main challenges the project faced came from the tight coupling of software-hardware interfaces. People could contribute to open-source code as much as they liked, but without access to the robot itself testing changes was extremely difficult. This I think, is still a predominantly unsolved problem in engineering.

The most common approach that aims to address this challenge is “software drivers” - code that rests between the hardware and other code to provide a common interface, and that can be swapped out for different drivers depending on the platform. But drivers as a software pattern alone aren’t enough to maximize the ability to people to collaborate on a project. The key is to break the right things, and in this case break the problem into smaller pieces.

By extracting functionally unique parts of Salvius’s code into their own separate and reusable libraries, I was able to open those parts of the project to people beyond the niche of hobbyist humanoid robotics. One prime example of this is ChatterBot, a library for generating textual responses to text inputs. Approaching 15K stars on its GitHub repository its a (surprising to me at least) star-count rival to other Python libraries. Here are a few examples of great ones that could use a few more starts:

• opencv-python - the OpenCV python library at just under 5K
• sqlalchemy - currently at 10K
• Gunicorn - 10K
• NLTK - The Natural Language Toolkit, at 13.8K
• speech_recognition - @Uberi’s wonderful speech_recognition library at 8.6K
• chartist - At 13.4K, the Chaartist JS charting library
• Postgres - Literal Postgres, at 16.8K (still well within the distance that I could catch up)
• Celery - At 25K still less than double.

I’m honored and humbled to be amongst so many excellent peers.

~ Gunther Cox, 2025

For those looking to learn more about Salvius and follow along with the projects furture development, salvius.org provides periodic blog posts, as well as other notes and content.