29 Apr 2011
maxwellrobotsros
Earlier today I gave a brief talk about our robotics program in the College-wide showcase.
In preparing the talk I recorded a small video of Maxwell navigating, under voice control.
This demo uses the ROS pocketsphinx wrappers that I previously developed to send a set of
predefined waypoints to the move_base node:
I'm going to try and post some updates from RoboGames tonight (as usual, about 2-4 weeks after the event....)
21 Apr 2011
national-robotics-weekrobots
Unfortunately, there was a small delay in me posting anything from out on the West Coast. This was
for two reasons:
The Internet connection at the hotel kinda sucked, this seems to be a recurring theme this month.
I was out far too late most nights with the Mech Warfare crowd.
I did manage to make it to the Stanford Robot Block Party this year. Maxwell did as well. At least in
pieces. The battery strap broke during shipment (into about 6 pieces), requiring Maxwell be opened
up for repairs:
Overall the sliding battery didn't do much damage, breaking only the charge connector and yanking a few wires.
It took about 25 minutes to correct things and then Maxwell took a tour around the facility.
We set up with the Home Brew Robotics Club guys, and next to Pi Robot:
14 Apr 2011
national-robotics-weekrobots
I spent Monday and Tuesday at the IEEE Technologies for Practical Robotics Applications (TePRA).
This is quite a different conference, with a lot of industry and military backing. Keynotes
speakers included funding managers from DARPA, the CEO of iRobot, the CEO of Vgo (a telepresence
bot manufacturer), etc. If you haven't seen the Vgo yet, it's a ~$5k telepresence bot which is
fairly stylish and lightweight:
The authors of papers included the usual crowd of academics and industry experts, but then some
other areas, such as industrial designers. One such person was Robert Antonuccio of Antonuccio Design,
presenting the X9 Minion walker (as seen in Robot Magazine). While the robot is pretty cool looking,
I was actually even more impressed with the incredible demo station he had set up. The day before demos
I had heard Robert talking with the organizers about getting set up the night before -- and then when
I saw the demo booth, it suddenly made sense why he needed lots of time to prep. This thing has to be
a beast to haul around:
I don't have time to highlight all of the interesting papers, but I though I would highlight two.
The first paper that really caught my eye was presented by Aaron Dollar, of Yale, "Practical Aerial
Grasping of Unstructured Objects". I'm not particularly interested in aerial platforms, but I am
interested in grasping when your localization sucks.
Also present at the conference was Zachary Dodds of Harvey Mudd College. Dodds is probably the most
energetic professor I have ever met, and he was presenting, quite enthusiastically, the work he and
his students did last summer on texture and machine learning-based monocular ranging (a system they
call PixelLaser) which might be of interest to readers. I believe I've come across the source in an
online repository at some point. Here's a quick image from the abstract:
This presentation was RIGHT before my own (on the PML), and was a hard act to follow... Later this
year, several students are going to be working to adapt this to the ArDrone quadrotor platforms (and
probably moving to ROS as well).
Anyways, I board a plane to California in about 6 hours, to continue National Robotics Week from the
other coast. I'll be stopping by the Stanford Robot Block Party tomorrow afternoon before continuing
on to Robogames. If you're going to be in the area, swing by and check out Maxwell
(and his lovely symposium poster) at Robogames.
Current tally for NRW: 2 events, 2 states, ~700mi of travel (by car).
(Photo from 
