Für alle deutschsprachigen Aibo Besitzer, die auch unter dem Problem fehlender Ersatzteile, mangelnder Informationen oder schlappen Akkus leiden hier ein Tipp:
Hier steht man euch mit Rat und Tat zur Seite, hilft bei kleineren Problemen und diskutiert auch über „non-Aibo“ Themen.
As we have already reported is the „Fraunhofer Autonomous Intelligent Robotics Devices“ Library now open source and available at the sourceforge project „OpenVolksBot„. In addition we can know report some more details on it.
So now we all can reuse and cooperated in a create library, instead of reinventing the „wheel“ again and again. 😉
Developing and programming robotic systems can sometimes be an unsatisfying task. This feeling is mostly not related to problems that occur during „high level“ problem solving. It is mostly appearing if you try to get the system it self up and running. So tools and solutions are needed to help us to overcome these initialization barriers.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems or for short Fraunhofer IAIS, does now offer a special computer library that can support the developer to get a width field of sensors and actors up and running. In addition it includes a various number of algorithmic for every day robotic problems like Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) or image processing. The so called „Fraunhofer Autonomous Intelligent Robotics Devices Library“ or for short FAIR library, is a C/C++ development library which is actively used in the VolksBot® projects and is released as open source project under the GNU-license Creative Commons.
FAIRlib is soon available at the sourceforge project „OpenVolksBot„.
Updated: The initail version is now available (see also here) and is published under the CC-by-sa-nc.
RoMeLa, the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech is currently working on „Robot Evolution Through Intelligent Design“. This means they are taking evolutionary inspired designs and try to adopted them to robotic purpose. Dennis W. Hong, PhD and his students have been creating a lot of really interesting new robots, for example three legged robots, snake like robots or humanoids (e.g. DARwIn). The talk from the TEDxNASA conference, Mr. Hong offers a short overview of their research.
By the way, if you’re wondering about that motto and how „evolution“ can meet „intelligent design“ here comes the answer. Hong tells us:
„Though it has both evolution and intelligent design in the sentence, it has nothing to do with either – „we“ push the boundaries and come up with the next generation robotics (robot evolution) through us doing rigorous research and designing them intelligently (intelligent design). I think it is a clever tag line for our lab.“
Prof. Johnny Chunge Lee is a researcher and currently working for „Microsoft – Applied Sciences“ in Redmond. He has a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction gained at the Carnegie Mellon University on his thesis „Projector-Based Location Discovery and Tracking“ [website].
On his website he has some great projects related to HMI that could also be helpful in robotics.
So for example his experiments on the usage of the WII controlers,
or his projects on Projector Calibration and RFID usage.
Europe is looking for talents! Those who are members of EURON have already read the announcement, those who are not must read now. The Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation is proud to introduce ‘Campus Party Europe.’ This event will be held in Madrid from April 14th to April 18th of 2010, celebrating the Spanish Presidency of the European Union and organized by Asociacion E3 Futura.
For four days, 800 young people from each of the 27 member states of the EU will participate in activities such as conferences, workshops and challenges centred around three knowledge areas: Science (Robotics, Astronomy and Modding), Digital Creativity (Video, Animation, Design, Photography and Blogs) and Innovation (Application development and Security). Travel, accomodation and catering costs will be fully covered by the organizaton!
In order to obtain your invitation, all you have to do is being registered as Campusero (if you still aren’t registered just fill the registration form with your personal data) and attach the information on the project in which you are participating at your “User Card” of the web.
What’s more, the best projects will be shown in the “Projects Forum” which will be held during Campus Party Europe and three of them (one from each area of knowledge: Science, Innovation and Digital Creativity) will be awarded with 3.000 Euros each.
For more information please refer to the official website of the event.
Every starting into an new field is hard work and so all of us are often seraching for first hand information that can guide us into this field. Podcasts are a new way to get a starting, but they only can help if they have a certain quality.
The project „Talking Robots“ has definitely a high quality level and presents a wide bandwidth of robotic topics in 45 podcasts. Each podcast presents one field in that way that one leading expert of that field is interviewed and therefore does the team of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) archive that the audiences get first hand information and a good starting point for deeper investigations.
Unfortunately has the project finished and no new talks are planned. Link RSS
Need RCX Sensors?
Take a look at http://www.techno-stuff.com/RCX.htm
Here is a cool promotional video from Honda:
„Living With Robots“
RobotsBlog is a new blog focusing on robot topics. It will included news, discussions, articles, and links around the wide field of robotic and AI.
We, the authors, are an international team of junior researchers and actively involved in robotics. And so we are every day seeing the challenging problems and extreme nice solutions and we will try to share as much as possible with you. Our hope is that this platform will help all of us to sort and structure the wide field of robotics a little bit so that other researchers, students and every interested person can maximize their personal benefit which are archival by robotics.
And now it is time to present you some of our previous work.
The first video is showing some test runs of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle or for short UAV, which is currently tested by the Fraunhofer IAIS.
The second video shows a autonomous ground base robot using its docking station. The robot does base on a ProfiBot system and is searching autonomously for its docking station if it is needed. After finding it is performing a docking maneuver and charges it batteries.
The next video shows some tests results derived from a computer vision system that is used to detected character based landmarks in the environment. This behavior was needed to participated at the SICK robot day 2009 which we succesfully have done.
So thats all for the starting, new updates are coming and we hope to see you soon again.