Looking for Robot that can be control in real time from external data

[Redding]

Hello,

I am a 4th year Mechatronics student currently doing my thesis. The topic of research I am doing is Real time robotic control using inertial motion capture suit. In other words I need to be able to control a robot from data that is being produced in real time. I am looking to spend about $400 on a robot that I can use for this project.

The main thing I'm after that I've been having trouble finding information about is that it needs to have suitable software/SDK that would allow me to send data to control the robot in real time. This data would be sent most likely from another program (e.g. MATLAB) and doesn't have to be wireless.

If anyone has any suggestions that would be fantastic, as most of the robots I have been looking at don't have much information about its programming capabilities.

Thanks!

[Suicidal.Banana]

Since nobody has said this yet i will, just take into account im hardly a robot builder, i just love reading these forums, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

First off, for sending data to your robot, the 3 most common methods are trough com port, xbee, or (when using dynamixels) usb2dynamixel, com port should be self explainatory, xbee are little cheap devices used for easy wireless data transfer (over like max 10meters i think) and usb2dynamixel is for connecting (dynamixel) servos directly to your pc, id strongly suggest you read into these 3, at the least (theres actually dozens of possibilitys, these appear to be most common used though)

And for detecting a person's motion, assuming you dont currentlly have any motion capture, you could build it with a kinect, the sdk (be it microsoft's one, or the initial open source one) should give you easy acces to the 'skeleton' of the person infront of the kinect.