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

Here is a link to an article from Technology Review about GPS style positioning technology that use small [it says the size of a hardback book] land based units.  Accuracy down to a few centimeters.  This version uses the same frequency [band] as wi-fi, but apparently with higher power. A single unit could cover several kilometers.  This is real technology already being used.

Ultrafine Location Fixes

One of the company co-founders is quoted as saying

Tracking goods and machines with high accuracy can enable greater use of robotics and automation.

Assuming a “location hotspot” is available, or can be setup at reasonable cost, this looks like an opportunity for robotics location awareness. Depending on thoses costs, down to the consumer level. The existing home robots that need to have hardware “electronic walls” installed could potentially use position sensing and a virtual wall instead.

How about

• a sumobot that knows its position relative to the ‘ring’ well enough that it does not need to completely rely on optical sensing of the white edges?
• a line follower that memorizes the path based on absolute position information? The high speed line followers could ‘plan’ acceleration, deceleration, and turns based on their position
• a Darpa style challenge where the ‘contestant’ is given only the geo-location of the goal

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Phil

I have been teaching introductory programming for the Arduino to a weekly class the past few weeks.  I missed collecting the email contact information for some of the people who joined the class in the last couple of weeks.  In the hope that they read these postings, I am publishing a notice here.

Here is a small homework reading assignment for the WCRS programming class attendees.  Read the Software Development Methodology article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development_methodology) on wikipedia, at least up to the start of “Subtopics”.  From those methodology descriptions, decide which of methodologies are being used for projects by people at WCRS.  Why did you pick that / those methodologies?  Which ones seem like they would fit?  Again, why?

To be discussed in class.

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Phil