Robots in the News

A few pieces of robotic news I came across this week!  First, a robot that can recognize itself in a mirror and tell the difference between itself and other objects.  The video is super cute!

Second, and perhaps more interesting, is a new robot driven by a Windows Phone.

The robot is being developed by WPBots and can actually work with Windows Phone or Android.  It's pretty neat and I'd love to try out some programming for it when it becomes available.

Modular robot reassembles when kicked apart

Creepy, but very cool.

Dextre

Nice to see more space innovations ala the Canadarm, especially coming from the CSA.

More about Dextre.

More Science in the News

Robots make another appearance in the news with the announcement of the vigilante-bot (named as such by me, haha).

In other news, a plutonium shortage which may limit future NASA space missions, and new evidence pointing to the age of the universe, coming in at 13.7 billion years old.

Even though it's been a while since my physics days, these things still hold some interest for me, especially astrophysics.

Open source robot: your next personal assistant - Network World

Robots certainly do seem to be in the news more so than even, say, a few months ago. Is this a sign of changing times, at least in N. America where people seem to have seen (or still see) robots as an element of science fiction?

Modular Snake Robots

Wow! A snake robot! And it's waterproof too. Pretty nifty.

Japanese robots enter daily life - USATODAY.com

I still miss Japan!

With the declining birthrate and large population of senior baby boomers, robots are poised to take over many of the tasks humans normally do. They've already had the robot secretary since I was there, roughly around 2004/2005. It will be interesting to see how robots emerge in Japan in the coming years.

Antique Robots

My aunt recently bestowed on me the gift of Antique Robots, which are not really robots but actually simple wind-up toys. They make a great addition to my bookshelf display, and I am going to display them here too.

The first is Robot Lilliput, a replica of a 1940's tin wind-up robot.


Note the ominous warning:


I also have a demonstration of this robot's capabilities:



And now for the second robot, Space Trooper:



And the accompanying demonstration video:



Unfortunately this robot is quite a bit slower than Robot Lilliput.

Robotting News

Finally, the story about our robot team and our win at the Richard Tapia robotics competition makes it onto the CS website! :)

Find the story here.

Robots Wrap Up

I realized I never posted any photos of our robot on this blog, although plenty abound on Facebook. I haven't had any success with posting videos on blogger, but you can see some pictures below:




(That's Caprica (our robot) on the left. On the right is a robot I've affectionately termed the 'Wiibot'.)

Tapia Robotics Competition - Final Results

Can be found here.

Richard Tapia Robotics Competition Results

Our team was given a Technical Achievement award for an insightful solution and excellent poster.

In all, 9 teams tried to qualify and 5 were accepted. We placed second in points in the final competition.

Robots & Conferences (II)

Last night one of my team-mates (Angelica Lim) and I worked on our robot (until 9am this morning). We are not sure as to the success of our codes since we encountered some minor technical difficulties. First, someone took our battery charger home with them (probably accidentally) and second, we couldn't charge the roomba batteries fast enough to work on. Since the batteries were not fully charged, we can not be sure of the results since the speed seems to be dependent on battery life.

Today is the competition, hopefully our robot will exceed our expectations.

Robots & Conferences

We [finally] arrived in Orlando after a harrowing journey on buses, taxis, and airplanes. A good deal of time was also spent between modes of transportation. Lesson learned: red eye flights are very cheap, but there are good reasons for avoiding them.

We got to the conference today and immediately started setting up and doing testing in the actual maze. There's a new video on facebook, as well as several photos. We are just doing some last minute code fixes (especially for blob-finding) and hopefully will be ready to go by tomorrow afternoon, when the first real trials are being held. We've also had some nice comments on our robot box, which we painted white to match the roomba icreate.

Tonight we will be participating in the poster presentation, after some minor complications (namely, I forgot the poster in Vancouver). I am very interested in the other projects and will hopefully get a chance to learn some new things tonight.

Overall I have been very impressed with the friendliness of the people we have encountered so far - from hotel and restaurant staff (speaking of which, our villa is super swanky!), to taxi drivers, to fellow conference attendees. It is very exciting to be part of the events taking place here this week!

This Just In...

Accepted to Graduate School (Computing, SFU)! Pretty exciting, I've been working really hard for the past year and a half or so so it means a lot to me.

Finally got the robot to move - it is completely powered by the roomba (which in turn is completely powered by its own battery) and the only cords are attached to keyboard/monitor (so we can control it). This is a very exciting step forward for us.

Strike My Last!

Upon replacing the motherboard, the CF card worked no problem. Same CF-IDE converter and everything. I guess it is because the new motherboard has two slots for those ribbon cables, where the old one only had one, and for some reason on the old one it automatically set the IDE to slave, which didn't work. Who knew!

Fun with Xubuntu on a CF Card/USB Stick

Update on my robot team's progress. Just spent a few late nights trying to install linux (Xubuntu Dapper) on a CF card and access it through a CF to IDE connected to a motherboard on our robot. It did not work. I guess there was some problem with the CF to IDE adaptor. We then tried to install Xubuntu on a 2GB USB stick. No matter what the online linux geeks say, it will not work. Xubuntu Dapper is too large for a 2GB USB stick. We switched to a 4GB USB stick, and now everything is working fine!

We found that the online Ubuntu forums are filled with posts about this very topic, but that they really try to make it a lot more complex than it really is. You don't need to do any partitioning, the install will do it for you (there are a lot of complicated instructions on how to do this - they will confuse you). Just go with slightly larger memory, and you won't need to go through all the hassle.

Robots!

We are now in the hardware phase of building our robot. Yesterday we were able to get linux installed on a CF card! No luck booting from it when connecting to the robot, however. We'll continue the work this weekend and hopefully have something usable by the start of next week. In the meantime, work continues on my data mining project, which I am now implementing, and I am also trying to keep up with my other two courses. In the picture above I don't look nearly as sleep-deprived as I actually am.

Richard Tapia Robotics Competition

The team from SFU that I am a member of, Nexus 6, submitted materials for the qualifying stage of the Richard Tapia Conference Robotics Competition on August 24th, and today were notified that the code we designed passed the trials it was put through for this stage. This means that we have been invited to the on-site competition in Orlando, Florida, this October. We are all very excited!

In other news, my has NSERC has ended - but the research continues! I will be taking CMPT 415: Special Research Topics, with Dr. Pei this fall in order to keep working on our projects.