Robot destroyed during testrun of the LHC

Today the LHC performed one of its atomic collision test. The goal was to validate the results of the last test run. During this test the  Large Hadron Collider produced a never seen amount of energy. Therefore  many skeptics said that the results where totally wrong because of the uncertainty principle. So this last test run tried to validated the results by using subatomic robots inside of the LHC to observe the collision and measuring the energy directly instead of indirect.

The approach failed by destroying the robots at four o’clock  and one minute this afternoon. One of the robots collided with the atom instead the other proton. Its remains where found 4,1 kilometer outer the the two thousand and tenth epipolar collider shield.

For a detailed report on this robotic accident take a look here.

The centenary of John R. Pierce birth

John Robinson Pierce was born in March 27, 1910 Des Moines – Iowa and died at April 2, 2002 in Sunnyvale – California. During his life time was he an expert in the fields of radio communication, microwave technology, computer music and psychoacoustics. His team developed in the year 1949 the first transistor. This pioneer work allowed the building of modern digital computers and robots, as well as nearly all digital components of our every day life.

For those that would like to learn more about this pioneer we recommend flowing artikels:

So, RoboBlog says happy birthday and thank you.

Adhesive foil/cover for Lego Mindstorms NXT available

Ever wanted to individualize your NXT a bit more?

Now you can buy the Roberta adhesive foils for Lego Mindstorms NXT (design by Ashley A. Green) at Technik LPE and coulourise your NXT the way you want. The foils are wipeable, heavy-duty and removable.

See:
http://roberta-home.de/de/aktuelles/|neu|-roberta-nxt-klebefolie

http://www.shop.lego-in-der-schule.de/Uebersicht?sparte=10

Empfehlenswertes Aibo Forum

Für alle deutschsprachigen Aibo Besitzer, die auch unter dem Problem fehlender Ersatzteile, mangelnder Informationen oder schlappen Akkus leiden hier ein Tipp:

http://www.aibo-freunde.de

Hier steht man euch mit Rat und Tat zur Seite, hilft bei kleineren Problemen und diskutiert auch über „non-Aibo“ Themen.

FAIR Libary is online

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.

  • The FAIRlib is now organized as several Eclipse-Project (fairAlgorithm, fairCore, fairDevices, fairGraphics, fairTestAlgorithm, fairTestCore, fairTestDevices and fairTestGraphics). This allows an easy extending and compiling the projects and minimizes the cross dependencies.
  • The dependences  are listed in the ReadMe and can be auto installed by using the script „apt-get-fair“
  • A way of easy installing is given by the script „install-fair
  • The current version is tested on the Ubuntu 9.10 (64-Bit) ,  but will also work on other OS (by side of auto solving the dependences)
  • Fair is published under the CC-by-sa-nc License .

So now we all can reuse and cooperated in a create library, instead of reinventing the „wheel“ again and again. 😉

Open source is FAIR – IAIS released the „Fraunhofer Autonomous Intelligent Robotics Devices Library“ as open source

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.

Dennis W. Hong presents RoMeLa

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.“