Hey guys.

Took some footage from the deck of my brutusbot to share with everyone.   Lots of work to still add, but so far 5K code out of 32K space!  Lots of room left!

We’d love to see your creations! Upload a video and send the link to info AT robotgames.com and we’ll check it out!

Getting closer to ‘desktop factory’ all the time.

Printing ‘small’ parts at high resolution.

The world’s smallest 3D printer

From the picture, it looks like that connects to a computer through a standard [old style] serial cable [not USB]

The video says he built if for about 1500 € [in parts?], at todays conversion, that would be just over $2000 Canadian. He said it has the capabilities of a 60000 € commercial printer [$81100] !!

These youtube videos are from the AI course being put out by Stanford, but anyone interested in autonomous robots should enjoy this.

Autonomous Vehicle Intro 1
Autonomous Vehicle Intro 2

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

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

An article from my news feeds. Good direction for those comfortable with phone ‘apps’, but not so much with microcontroller programming.

Two New Robots with Smart Phones for Brains

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

A news item for you.  Theoretical research on walking, running, and the transition from one to the other.  Nothing directly useful here for awhile, but if/when this gets better developed, it means that a legged robot can stably walk and run without needing a lot of sensors and fine control over the real time position of each moving part.  Instead the mechanical design of the leg, plus fairly simple control over the angle that the leg meets the ground gives good control.  Major reduction in sensors, feedback, and needed processing power.

Exploiting the Passive Dynamics of a Compliant Leg to Develop Gait Transitions

The article also includes a link to a link, that would allow buying the full 6 page Physical Review Article.

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phil

Here is an article [with video] that I found about a small robot for ‘rough’ terrain.  The article says the basic unit can be either tracked or wheeled, but the video shows only the tracked version.  From context this appears to be strictly remote controlled, with no onboard navigation or sensor interpretation.  Something like this would make a good base [just add smarts ] for the cross-country / Darpa style challenge idea that has been bounced around at WCRS events on a regular basis.

Versatile robot rascals weigh in for battle

The press release linked from the article has a ‘little’ more detail.  There is also a facebook page with more pictures, still only the tracked version though

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Phil

I found this in my news feeds. An article about using visible light instead of, or to augment, short range wireless communication, with quite high [100 Mbit/s] bandwidth.

Data are traveling by light

If the power needed to drive the transmitter leds (and total amount of light) is in a reasonable range, this technique could be used to communicate with or between [mobile] robots. This looks like much the same concept as infra-red remote controls, but with considerably higher bandwidth. The visible light is more line of sight though. Any opaque object in the light path would block the signal. Some infra-red systems will ‘bounce’ signals off of surfaces to work ‘around’ direct obstructions.

For robot communications [mesh network], maybe more directional channels would work better [to reduce power requirements]. Use one or more leds in a curved reflector. Depending on the shape of the reflector used, that could limit the communications to a single ‘target’, or maybe only to [near] a single ‘plane’.

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Phil