How do robots see the world? How do they gather meaning from our streets, cities, media and from us? This is an experiment in found machine-vision footage, exploring the aesthetics of the robot eye.
If you have been wondering where we have been, January has been product development month at I Heart Engineering. We are pleased to announce that ROS (Robot Operating System) is now available for pre-order on DVD. We are currently planning to start shipping on February 7th.
This DVD has a few great features that make it a convenient way to get started with ROS. It can be used as a LiveDVD so you can boot from it and try out things like rviz and Gazebowithout having to format your hard drive. Once you are ready, the DVD installer will take care of the basic configuration to help you get started quickly with Ubuntu 10.04 and ROS Electric Emys.
$10 of every purchase will be set aside to help fund the creation of a ROS Foundation. In the event that things don’t work out and a ROS Foundation can not be established in the next three years the funds will be donated to the EFF.
On our “playlist” – This and Star Trek Next Generation Blue Ray
A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors. Experiments performed with a team of nano quadrotors at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania. Vehicles developed by KMel Robotics via waxy.
The latest technology that seems to be working its way along this trajectory is 3D printing. For those not in the MAKE crowd, 3D Printers are machines that produce three-dimensional objects from digital data by printing in thin layers of physical material, similar to the way an inkjet prints in two dimensions. A 3D printer outputs not words on paper, but a thing. After a couple decades of research, development, and industrial deployment, the technology appears to be on the threshold of developing a mass market. Still, it’s hard to imagine what to do with such a general purpose machine sitting in one’s house.
And that’s what makes Brendan Dawes such an interesting early adopter. For one, he’s kept meticulous records of his productions since he bought his MakerBot Thing-O-Matic from Makerbot Industries, a company that sells stripped down do-it-yourself 3D printers directly to consumers, in December 2010. Over the past year he has posted his “printings” on a tumblr called everythingimakewithmymakerbot. The site reads like a diary or sketchbook; an intimate account of a creative person interacting with a new technology.
Small push-pull solenoid. Solenoids are basically electromagnets: they are made of a big coil of copper wire with an armature (a slug of metal) in the middle. When the coil is energized, the slug is pulled into the center of the coil. This makes the solenoid able to pull (from one end) or push (from the other)
This solenoid in particular is fairly small, with a 30mm long body and a ‘captive’ armature with a return spring. This means that when activated with up to 24VDC, the solenoid moves and then the voltage is removed it springs back to the original position, which is quite handy. Many lower cost solenoids are only push type or only pull type and may not have a captive armature (it’ll fall out!) or don’t have a return spring. This one even has nice mounting tabs, its a great all-purpose solenoid.
I’ve been practicing with Tinycopter a little more, and it’s fairly stable and working now. In fact, I might even make a page for Flying Objects now that it’s working. That still doesn’t prevent me from randomly “re-zeroing” it on the ground, however, nor other unfortunate mishaps.
Jim Henson made this film in 1963 for The Bell System. Specifically, it was made for an elite seminar given for business owners, on the then-brand-new topic — Data Communications. The seminar itself involved a lot of films and multimedia presentations, and took place in Chicago. A lengthy description of the planning of the Bell Data Communications Seminar — sans a mention of the Henson involvement — is on the blog of Inpro co-founder Jack Byrne. It later was renamed the Bell Business Communications Seminar.
The organizers of the seminar, Inpro, actually set the tone for the film in a three-page memo from one of Inpro’s principals, Ted Mills to Henson. Mills outlined the nascent, but growing relationship between man and machine: a relationship not without tension and resentment: “He [the robot] is sure that All Men Basically Want to Play Golf, and not run businesses — if he can do it better.” (Mills also later designed the ride for the Bell System at the 1964 World’s Fair.) Henson’s execution is not only true to Mills’ vision, but he also puts his own unique, irreverent spin on the material.
The robot narrator used in this film had previously starred in a skit for a food fair in Germany (video is silent), in 1961. It also may be the same robot that appeared on the Mike Douglas Show in 1966. Henson created a different — but similar — robot for the SKF Industries pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair.
This film was found in the AT&T Archives. Thanks go to Karen Falk of the Henson Archives for providing help and supporting documentation to prove that it was, indeed, a Henson production..
Footage courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center, Warren, NJ
[Editor's note: At Adafruit we're having some FIRST robotics participants post up on Adafruit, Today's is from Harry - here's a quick note about him " I'm 17 years old, have been involved in FIRST LEGO League in various ways for 8 years. I'm currently a junior in college majoring in Physics, but will be transferring to a different school in the fall to pursue a degree in Electrical Engineering. In my spare time I work on various Open Hardware projects, which can be found at https://github.com/hjohnson"]
Early on a Saturday morning (5:40 AM to be exact) a small group of dedicated volunteers, including me, arrived at a university’s field house. We moved quickly, setting up breakfast, making coffee, triple-checking our preparations, and taking a collective deep breath. We knew that in an hour, over 500 middle school students and their mentors would arrive, and that we’d be running on adrenaline for the next 12 hours. Such is the life of an inner-circle FIRST LEGO League event volunteer.
What a crowd! Above, teams compete while other teams are queued.
FIRST LEGO League is an international robotics competition for 9-14 year olds run by the organization founded by inventor Dean Kamen, of insulin pump and Segway fame. Teams of students build and program LEGO autonomous robots that compete on a standardized 4’ x 8’ table covered with LEGO field models. Since the theme of the competition this year was food safety, a typical mission would be for the robot to retrieve a truck filled with groceries, allowing the students to remove the groceries, load them onto their robot, and deliver them to a kitchen table. Teams have 2.5 minutes to rack up points completing as many tasks as possible, in any order. During the season, the teams also research a topic related to the year’s theme, and create a 5-minute presentation to discuss their results. Teams in the USA bring their robots and presentations to state and regional competitions in an effort to advance, either to the international World Festival held in St. Louis, or one of the FLL Open tournaments.
Teams who win awards also receive these LEGO trophies.
At our state tournament, judging started at around 7:30. Things were pretty quiet while the teams were in judging, but then at 11:30, everything ramped back up again. The 54 teams paraded into the main competition room, an indoor gym, complete with bleachers. Meanwhile, our group of referees huddled, going over last minute rule clarifications and making sure that any first-time referees were matched with veterans. We all wore the classic referee zebra shirts and carried pencils, clipboards, and scoring sheets. Some of us also wore silly hats to humanize us for the kids; I dislike goofy hats, so donned a top hat. At noon, the main spectator event began, a mass of music, excited shrieking students, and robots. At a given instant four teams would be on the clock, the kids jumping out of their seats as the robot worked, or sitting in crushed defeat when it didn’t. Meanwhile, at the other two tables, the referees scored the field with the teams, filling out checkboxes on a score sheet, getting them verified by the team, sending them to the scorekeepers, getting the current team out, resetting the field, and bringing the new team in. All in about 4 minutes. When my table was active, I had to keep a kindly but vigilant eye on the teams and their robots and enforce the robot game’s rules. These rules included: penalizing teams for touching the robot if it was anywhere but home base; noting field damage caused by errant robots; and correcting field damage caused by overexcited children; among many others.
Two members of a team preparing their robot.
Another team's robot in motion. Here, the green germ dispenser (that the robot is driving towards) has been actuated.
Me filling out a scoresheet with a team.
This whole cycle repeated until each of the teams had been run through 3 times, which took around 4 hours. By this point, I’d been on my feet on concrete for about 10 hours. We broke down all of the tables, packed them away, and sat in the bleachers to watch the final awards ceremony. Then, as teams filed out of the building, we finished cleaning up. Finally, at 6:00, we shuffled out of the building, exhausted but happy that we’d pulled off another tournament.
Kipp Bradford talks about his childhood LEGO projects at closing ceremonies.
It is that FIRST Robotics competition time of the year. Basically, in FIRST, high school students work in teams to build robots that compete in specific tasks. Apparently, this year a task involves throwing a basketball into a goal. And this leads to the popular question: how do I tell my robot to throw the ball? Oh? Projectile motion you say? Well, not so fast. Let us check some things first (or FIRST).
To appeal to young children, the robot prototype in this new project resembles a cute, stuffed animal-like dragon. Its movement appears very life-like and can be remotely controlled through an Internet interface.
“Certain non-verbal cues like mimicking behavior to improve rapport and social bonding, or changes in gaze direction to guide shared attention, are central,” DeSteno said. “When kids learn from human teachers, these cues enhance the learning. We’re designing our new dragon robots to be able to have these capabilities.”
Researchers will situate the child and the robot at a table in a preschool setting to interact with each other and observe the exchange of social and emotional cues that show approval and engagement, such as nodding and eye gaze, while an operator controls the robot from a computer.
The FIRST Robotics Competition just kicked off, with a new challenge this year, and a new twist: Teams will have the chance to control their robots using Microsoft’s Kinect sensor!
Mike Fennelly isn’t easily surprised by cutting-edge technologies, but when he started as an IT guy at a Silicon Valley startup called Evernote, he was caught off guard by a robot rolling around the office.
“It was slightly disturbing for not really knowing what the robot was for at the beginning, and then going, ‘Oh, OK. That’s Phil,’ ” he says.
CEO Phil Libin is also known as the company’s “robotic overlord.” Libin himself isn’t actually a robot, but when he’s out of town, his robot keeps an eye on things.
Technology that allows people to be present even while far away is becoming more affordable than ever. Companies working on “telepresence robots” are building off the idea that busy schedules and the hassle of travel require such products.
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