Monthly Archives: November 2011

Beakerhead

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Jeremie and I had an opportunity to attending the announcement event for Beakerhead!

Aiming to be a fusion of science, engineering and creativity (a video presentation called to mind the kind of wacky robotic contraptions you see at Burning Man), Beakerhead is the brainchild of co-founders Jay Ingram, best known for his work with the Discovery Channel, and his partner Mary Anne Moser. Collaborating organizations at this point include the U of C’s Schulich School of Engineering, Mount Royal University,SAIT Poytechnic, Telus Spark, the Glenbow Museum and local arts groups such as the High Performance Rodeo, the Calgary Animated Objects Society and the Green Fools.

Check out http://www.beakerhead.org/ for more info!

You can also follow them on twitter @Beakerhead

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I’ve been following the online AI class from Stanford.  Included in that was a video with descriptive commentary of the robot that won the DARPA challenge.  The video is also on youtube.  The ‘trick’ was to overlay very accurate but short range laser sensor data, with much less accurate but long range camera vision, to ‘infer’ what was further ahead than it could see with the lasers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q1xFdQfq5Fk

Navigating beyond the reach of GPS

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Found an article about some research to allow navigation / position detection where GPS does not work.  Bigger systems already use this technology, but the research is to develop it for use on small resource and battery life constrained devices, like cell phones.  That will also apply to small, mobile, indoor robotics projects.

Navigating beyond the reach of GPS