There is a new version (1.5) of the german NXC Tutorial available at the Roberta website.
Now with support for the motor-rotation counter and the NXT 2.0 color-sensor.
There is a new version (1.5) of the german NXC Tutorial available at the Roberta website.
Now with support for the motor-rotation counter and the NXT 2.0 color-sensor.
Currently I’m participating at the workshop of Safety, Security and Rescue Robots 2010 in Bremen.
The first day is now gone and a lot of interesting talks have been given:
Tetsuya Kinugasa has shown a Flexible Displacement Sensor in his talk of „Measurement of Flexed Posture for Mono-tread Mobile Track Using New Flexible Displacement Sensor„. His group develops and uses this sensor to control the posture of a robot which is a combination of snake, worm and tank.
Jimmy Tran presented his works on „Canine Assisted Robot Deployment for Urban Search and Rescue„. The basic idea is as simple as brilliant, use a equipped dog to find victims and to inform operators about him. So, dogs are well used in rescue and they have a high mobility. They can easily overcome huge rubles and are able to carry video cameras or rescue material. So, his approach is to use the dogs to deploy a small robot next to a victim, which would allow to investigate medical status of the person. The idea is hilarious.
„Development of leg-track hybrid locomotion to traverse loose slopes and irregular terrain“ is so far the most interesting technical approach of this workshop. It shows a way how a tracked like vehicle can be combined with a semi-Walker.
Donny Kurnia Sutantyo presented his work on „Multi-Robot Searching Algorithm Using Levy Flight and Artificial Potential Field„, while Julian de Hoog showed a solution for team exploration in „Dynamic Team Hierarchies in Communication-Limited Multi-Robot Exploration“.
The invited speaker Bernardo Wagner showed the outcomes of his department. The Leibniz University of Hannover has worked intensively in the field of „Perception and Navigation with 3D Laser Range Data in Challenging Environments„.
„Potential Field based Approach for Coordinate Exploration with a Multi-Robot Team“ is topic of Alessandro Renzaglia.
Bin Li showed another nice approach of a shape shifting robot. His robot is able to shape shift it self by rearranging its three motion segments. „Cooperative Reconfiguration between Two Specific Configurations for A Shape-shifting Robot“
Jorge Bruno Silva presented a approach of trajectory planing while respecting time constrains in „Generating Trajectories With Temporal Constraints for an Autonomous Robot“
Noritaka Sato closed the day by presenting novel a HMI approach for teleoperation. Instead of showing only the direct camera image his group uses temporal shifted images to generate an artificial bird eye view, like it is given in computer car games. „Teleoperation System Using Past Image Records Considering Moving Objects“
I am looking forward to listen to the next talks.
New Roberta-Experiment „Braitenberg Vehicle“ is now online and free downloadable for registered Roberta-Teachers http://www.roberta-home.de/de/aktuelles/neues-roberta-material
The program code for the balancing Roberta robot „Philippe Petit“ is now available for download at the Roberta-Homepage. The download is available for all Roberta Teachers at the internal download section. Videos are available at the Roberta Youtube-Channel.
Not eXactly C is a high-level programming language for the Lego Mindstorms NXT. NXC, which is short for Not eXactly C, is based on Next Byte Codes, an assembly language. NXC has a syntax like C.
There is a new version of the NXC Tutorial available at the Roberta Homepage. It is an extended german version of the tutorial original based on the work of Daniele Benedettelli.
You can download the german tutorial for free here: http://roberta-home.de/de/was-bietet-roberta/roberta-reihe/nxc-tutorial
The English original version is available here: http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/nxcdoc/NXC_tutorial.pdf
I just discovered the homepage of „Terrapin – Tools for Thinking“ and found another LOGO-programming environment, called Terrapin Logo.
Terrapin Logo supports robotics with built-in commands for Lego’s RCX and NXT robotic controllers. Use Terrapin Logo to start and stop motors, read and react to switches and sensors, and control and integrate your robotic constructions into your Logo environment.
So i got in touch with the Terrapin team to get an evaluation version. I will write about my experiences with Terrapin Logo here. Until then, have a look at the Homepage and also take a look at the Pro-Bot Robot, a Logo-integrated Robot.
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. 😉
Everybody who has ever designed and built a robot by him self knows about the difficulty by building special components like sensor holders, adapters or axes bearings . Either you have to pay a huge amount of money to a company that is willing to build small product series on it or , which is more common you build them by your self and spend a lot of time on prototyping and manufacturing tasks, and then build it by hand. For the last option the usage of a 3D-printers can speedup the process.
Generally spoken is a 3D-Printer an industrial robot with several degree of freedoms, that is moving an extruder and injects either plastic or metal in a way that a plastic or metal object (the prototypes) are created. This technology allows therefore to print physical objects. By using this technology, the coast of one object/prototype are dramatically shrinking. More or leas the coast of one object is given by the material coasts and the time which is needed to build a CAD-Design of the object.
The major drawback of 3D-Print is the acquisition costs. Professional printer can easily coast more then 20.000€. But there is hope. The open source project RepRap allows us to build our own 3D-Printer by coast round about 500€. RepRap stands for Replicating Rapid-prototyper and is a hardware open source project. Like the big industrial machines does this project support a easy way do build your first prototypes.
RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.
Mendel’s improvements over Darwin from Rep Rap on Vimeo.
Of course there is also darkness. The RepRap-hardware is currently on the state of the industrial machines from 5 years ago. For example does the open source version not support to printing two type of material simultaneously. But this is extremely usefully if you have to build object with huge holes, which would collapse if there is no filling material inside that will be removed later.
But still this technollogy makes prototyping that easy and quick that it is worth to give it a try.
Updated:
The „Elektrischer-Reporter“ (German) has a reportage of the background and the ideas for the close future on 3D-Printing and homemade products. The basic stadement is an upcoming change of production lines. Every customers will be also a small factory and an upcoming market of „digital construction plans“ will showup.
Bored of chasing turtles? Try Logo Progamming on your Lego Mindstorms NXT!
Take a look at
http://virtuallab.kar.elf.stuba.sk/robowiki/index.php?title=Logo_for_NXT
to get all you need to run Logo-programs on you NXT.
Edit (Sebastian Trella): My first tries with this NXT_Logo-project were successful after some small problems. I will inform you about Logo-projects coming up here…
Because the original Download Servers are not well reachable and some of my downloads failed, i decided to host a copy here:
nxt_logo_2009_july_25 (Copyright Pavel Petrovic, IDI NTNU, robotika.sk.)