Pleo

Revision as of 23:24, 8 March 2016

Pleo was a robotic dinosaur created by UGOBE and released around 2007. Although it used the Free Software (Apache licensed) Pawn programming language as the embedded langugae, Pleo almost exclusivly used proprietary file formats for all other aspects.

Sound

Pleo has the ability to play mono, 8-bit 11k sound files. These sound files begin as a WAV file, but are converted into a USF Ugobe Sound File by UGOBE's proprietary tools. This USF file includes various additional header information which is necessary for the Pleo to play the sound.

Motion

Pleo has the ability to move through 14 motors which are spread throughout the robot. UGOBE provided 3D-modelling templates for the 3dsMax software, and completed 'animations' can be exported as a CSV file. This CSV file is then converted into the proprietary UMF Ugobe Motion File format, which like the sound file includes additional header and playback information.

Project Files

Another format used by Pleo is the Ugobe Project file. This is an XML document that contains various linking information, allowing sounds and motions to be linked with Pawn source files. The build tools then read the UPF and generate the Resource File.

The Ugobe Resource File (URF) is a bundle file containing all the compiled code, sounds, motions and other resources that are required for that particular program.

External Links

• The Pleo Programmer's Guide] has information on the structure of the file formats mentioned above, as well as other used file formats and other information about Pleo
• MySkit is an application that can convert WAV to USF, and CSV to UMF, as well as vice-versa. Originally intended to create self contained animations for Pleo, it can also produce URF files of these animations form the USF / UMF files. Some of the source code for MySkit that deals with the I/O of these files can be found in OpenPDK (see below)
• OpenPDK is a collection of scripts aiming to be a free software (mostly GPL licensed) alternative to the proprietary UGOBE tools. It is far from complete, but provides a useful starting point.