A Quick and Easy Guide to Using UMBmark

Posted 14 Feb 2009 at 15:36 UTC by steve

Paul Bouchier of the Dallas Personal Robotics Group has posted a new article, A Quick & Easy Guide to Calibrating Your Robot Using UMBmark, to help explain how the Borenstein UMBmark can be used to help diagnose and improve dead reckoning in your robot. Borenstein's paper, UMBMark - A Method for Measuring, Comparing, and Correcting Dead-reckoning Errors in Mobile Robots (PDF format) was originally published back in 1994 and has been in use by both professional and hobby roboticists around the world since. The basic idea is that most dead-reckoning errors come from either systematic errors such unequal wheel diameters or non-systematic errors such as wheel-slippage. The UMBmark test is designed to uncover the systematic error in a way that make the cause more obvious to the builder. The best part is that the UMBmark is easy to do and require no fancy test equipment. The video above is DPRG member David P Anderson's JBot performing part of the UMBmark during a 2007 DPRG UMBmark exercise

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Robots: Robot Ethics (Part 1)

Posted 13 Feb 2009 at 11:37 UTC by mwaibel

With autonomous sentry robots stationed at the borders of Korea and Israel, more than 12,000 robots presently serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and funding for the US Future Combat System exceeding $230 billion, calls for a large public debate on robot ethics are louder than ever. A special two part series of Robots now focusses on robot ethics, featuring interviews with two world-renowned experts with different views. In the first interview of the series, Noel Sharkey, professor of Public Engagement, AI and Robotics, joins us from the University of Sheffield, UK, while in the next episode we will hear from Ronald Arkin, professor at Georgia Tech, US. The interviews were recorded individually and both researchers were asked the same questions. To listen to the first interview in the series, covering Noel Sharkey's overview of the current situation and discussions on military robots, robots in society, medical robots and legal responsibilities, visit the Robots website or directly tune in to the podcast!

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A Robot Birthday for Darwin

Posted 12 Feb 2009 at 19:56 UTC (updated 13 Feb 2009 at 22:06 UTC) by steve

Today is Charles Darwin's 200th birthday and this month also marks the 150th anniversary of his book, On the Origin of Species. As might be expected there are shindigs and events all over the world. There's even a Darwin Look-Alike contest at ASU and a Darwin Google logo for the occasion. Other organizations and website are focusing on how other fields of science were changed by Darwin's theory of evolution. But not us, no siree. We're going to remind you how much evolution has impacted robotics. While the direct application of evolutionary algorithms is obvious, there are other less obvious connections. For example, scientists are about to release a rough draft of the Neanderthal genome, pieced together from 38,000 year old bones found in Croatia. By comparing the Neanderthal genes to those of chimpanzees and humans, we'll learn a great deal about how our brains evolved. This in turn will suggest new approaches for creating intelligent robots.

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5MP Autofocus Camera in a 1/4 Inch Module

Posted 11 Feb 2009 at 23:50 UTC by steve

Advasense has announced what they claim is the world's smallest 5MP autofocus camera module. The module, which was developed with the help of Creative Sensor Inc., uses a technology called Feedback Controlled Pixels (FCP) to reduce image lag and noise within the tiny sensor. The new moduled, the ASIO 5, is designed for mobile phones but looks ideal for robotics use. The sensor provides a maximum resolution of 2592x1944 at 15 FPS, HD 1080p at 30 FPS, or 720p at 60 FPS. The output is Bayer RGB data (for the ASIO5) or RGB and YUV (for the ASIO5I). Both MIPI and SMIA serial output is provided as well as a parallel output and an I2C control interface. In addition to autofocus, the module also provides built-in image stabilization. For more details see the full specification. No word on quantity or single unit pricing but most mobile phone components are designed to be as inexpensive as possible.

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Random Robot Roundup

Posted 10 Feb 2009 at 16:46 UTC by steve

A few days away from the editorial helm and the mailbox is overflowing with robot stories again. Let's see, Jan sent us a link to a NetworkWorld story on Axel, the NASA mountain climbing robot. Doug let us know about research done at the PERCRO lab in Germany that resulted in a robot that uses stereo vision and algorithms inspired by the human brain to navigate and avoid obstacles. Mark sent us some video showing off some of his customized versions of consumer robots. The Swirling Brain accumulated stories on a pong-playing robot, the appearance of a Hanson Robotics Einstein head at the TED conference, a nice gallery of retro robot scuptures, a gallery of updated terminator robots, and a techradar story that gets inside the "minds" of thinking computers. Know any other robot news, gossip, or amazing facts we should report? Send 'em our way please.

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Joshua: DIY Chess Playing Robot

Posted 6 Feb 2009 at 19:02 UTC (updated 6 Feb 2009 at 19:04 UTC) by steve

It's been a couple of years since we mentioned the Joshua DIY chess playing robot, so when I noticed the announcement of a new version, I thought I'd write it up. For those who don't remember, Joshua is a DIY free software / free hardware chess robot that includes schematics as well as complete software with a nice GUI (licensed under the GNU GPL) to control the finished chess robot. The system uses a photosensitive chess board to track the position of the pieces. A stepper motor interface is used to control the robot through a conventional desktop computer. The robot itself (pictured after the break) consists of a 3D workcell with chain drive and a gripper driven by a hobby servo.

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K-9 Wins Latest Trossen Robot Contest

Posted 6 Feb 2009 at 00:00 UTC by steve

Our friends at Trossen Robotics have announced the winners of the latest TRC Project Contest. The 1st place winner is a robot based on K-9 from Doctor Who. It's not just a replica prop either, this robot does 3D mapping, real-time occupancy grids, speech synthesis, and obstacle avoidance. For those who aren't familiar with the contest, here's the official description:

A wide range of talented and dedicated people come to our Project Showcase forum in the Trossen Robotics Community to show off projects they've been working on. Periodically, we (the Trossen Robotics team) sort through these projects, and "scientifically" score them in the following categories: "Wow" factor, Ingenuity, Creativity, and Presentation (graphics, videos, documentation, explanation, etc.). We run this contest to help promote and encourage ingenuity and innovation. Contestants are allowed to submit a wide range of projects ranging from robotics, automation, art, RFID, DIY, mods, inventions, or anything else demonstrating some form of technological creativity.

Be sure to check out the other winners, including the Robotic Marionette in 2nd place, and the animtronic harry animal robot thing in 3rd place, as well as several runners up.

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Introduction to Arduino Programming

Posted 4 Feb 2009 at 19:27 UTC by steve

The folks at the uC Hobby blog have posted a gentle introduction to microcontroller programming. To make things easy, they use the easy to find and inexpensive Arduino Duemilanove controller, which is a free hardware design based on the Atmel ATmega168 MCU. The short tutorial explains the IDE, which uses a free software programming language called "Processing" - basically a simplified version of C which hides a main() function containing a simple program loop. The programs themselves are called "sketches" but for the most part look like normal C programs. All this processing and sketches business apparently makes the learning curve a bit smoother for beginners who have no previous programming experience. That means first time users will be able to get their project working faster. The tutorial takes the user through writing, compiling, and running a simple program to blink LEDS.

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Tmsuk T-34: A Robot with Spidey Sense?

Posted 3 Feb 2009 at 20:05 UTC by steve

We mentioned the Tmsuk T-34 in our last news roundup and now we've got video of the robot actually firing its net launcher at a human. Apparently, finding evil Ninjas skulking around your warehouse is a big problem in Japan, so Tmsuk Co. and Alacom Co., Ltd have jointly developed the T-34, a robot that nets bad guys, just like Spiderman. The robot can operate autonomously or be teleoperated from a mobile phone interface with a real-time video feed. It has a top speed of 10 km/h, allowing it to chase running humans. The T-34 rides on a 4 wheel base, is 520mm high, weighs 12kg and is equipped with sensitive audio sensors and listens for abnormal sounds as it patrols a secure area. It appears the T-34 uses off-the-shelf Nippon Koki net launchers. If you read Japanese, you can find more details and specs in Tmsuk's T-34 press release (PDF format). We also found a Reuters photo gallery of the T-34 in action. Video via Robot Watch.

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Robots: Human-Robot Love

Posted 2 Feb 2009 at 14:08 UTC by mwaibel

Ever fallen in love with a robot? Married a robot - or dreamt about it? Wondered about sex with a robot, and wished there were an X- (or XXX-) prize for this problem, a competition for robots to pass a sexual Turing test? As social anthropologist Kathleen Richardson researching human-robot relationships points out in the latest Robots podcast, humans are very diverse. They can fall in love with - and have sex with - many things. David Levy, author of Love and Sex with Robots, thinks marriage, love and sex with robots will inevitably become main stream - the latter starting within the next 5 years. For two controversial views on the subject, tune in to the latest podcast episode, Human-Robot Love.

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Robot Rewind - Weird Robot Articles of the Past Year or So

Posted 1 Feb 2009 at 06:09 UTC by The Swirling Brain

There's been a slew of weird and amusing robot stories in the past year on robots.net. I thought it would be fun to take a trip down the robots.net memory lane at a sampling of the weird robot stories we've seen in the past year or so. Click through to read the weird robot stories article (below, or try looking somewhere else or under your bed if you can't find it below).

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Random Robot Roundup

Posted 1 Feb 2009 at 01:13 UTC by steve

Robots.net reader symphonygirl sent a link to an interesting NPR podcast featuring P.W. Singer, author of the recent book, Wired for War, on the ethical and legal questions of autonomous robots on the battlefield. If your local robot group is looking to start a robot army of its own, you might find a new Instructable on Open Manufacturing useful. It describes how to set up a large run of Arduino-based robot kits. The Swirling Brain unloaded a pile of new stories on us including new brain research showing that one type of neuron acts much like RAM in a computer, holding information in memory for up to a minute. He also noticed a New Scientist article summarizing variants of the Turing test currently being used in the real world to measure how fast robots are closing in on human level abilities. Rating 7.5 on the Turing test of weird robot stories, the BBC reports on the new Tmsuk T-34 security robot that can be teleoperated from a mobil phone and commanded to hurl nets over intruders. After the T-34 nets a bad guy, perhaps he can hoisted in the air and hauled off to jail by MIT's new autonomous robot forklift. Know any other robot news, gossip, or amazing facts we should report? Send 'em our way please.

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Scientists Create Logic Gates from Living Neurons

Posted 31 Jan 2009 at 00:33 UTC by steve

A recent news release reveals that Elisha Moses and other researchers from the Physics of Complex Systems group at the Weizmann Institute have created functional logical microcircuits from living neuron cells grown in a geometrical design. So far, they've created AND gates, diodes (pictured above), and a threshold device that passes only signals whose strength exceeds a preset limit. The researchers are pulling this off by coaxing nerves to grow along tiny grooves etches in glass. They've also developed a way of triggering the neurons with magnetic fields rather than direct electrical stimulation. What's really interesting is that they've gotten so good at making these neuronal devices, that they'll grow and test a custom design submitted by you. Moses had this to say about the project:

We have been able to enforce simplicity on an inherently complicated system. Now we can ask, ‘What do nerve cells grown in culture require in order to be able to carry out complex calculations?’ As we find answers, we get closer to understanding the conditions needed for creating a synthetic, many-neuron ‘thinking’ apparatus.

It will be interesting to see if the "only brains made of meat can be conscious" crowd are willing to accept the idea of a meat-brained robot. For more information on the research, see the group's web page, Logic Devices from Neuronal Cultures. They've just published a research paper with all the details in Nature, Reliable neuronal logic devices from patterned hippocampal cultures. If you don't want to pay Nature $30, you can find some of the details in their supplementary information document (PDF format).

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Honeybees Beat Computers at Face Recognition

Posted 29 Jan 2009 at 21:51 UTC (updated 29 Jan 2009 at 21:51 UTC) by steve

Robots.net reader Jan let us know about some interesting new research from Dr. Adrian Dyer at Monash University. It turns out honey bees can learn to recognize human faces from different angles. Not impressed yet? The bees are doing it with brains that are 0.01 percent the size of a human brain. Their entire brain only has about one million neurons. Yet the bees are doing a better job than the most advanced machine vision systems. This means bee brains are doing things much more efficiently than machine vision researchers believed possible. The researchers have already learned one bee brain secret - the bees do image interpolation on multiple rotated views of the face, allowing them to recognize the same face at a novel rotational angle. After researchers get over their surprise that bees are mentally rotating images in their tiny brains, they'll get right on the job of improving machine vision, making for better, faster, and cheaper robots. For more technical details see the paper Insect Brains Use Image Interpolation Mechanism to Recognise Rotated Objects (PDF format). Honey bee photo by flickr user cygnus921.

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Top Industrial Control How-Tos from 2008

Posted 28 Jan 2009 at 19:12 UTC (updated 28 Jan 2009 at 19:12 UTC) by steve

Just when you thought you'd seen the last 2008 Top Ten list, I stumbled across Industrial Control's Top 20 Industrial Control How-To's of 2008. Ok, it's 20 and not 10 and it's aimed at industrial designers; but there are still some useful How To articles here for robotics people too. For example, Basics of the Electric Servomotor and Drive explains the basis of permanent-magnet brush motors and brushless motors. Another interesting How To article is Open-Source Robotics and Process Control Circuit Examples, which describes the use of GNU/Linux-based software to interface with sensors and actuators as well as controlling DC motors and stepper motors. Another How To, The basics of control system design, explains PID, something every robot designer has struggled with at one time or another. There are several other interesting How To articles in the collection so check it out.

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Autonomous People-Moving Bots Coming to Rome

Posted 28 Jan 2009 at 01:48 UTC by steve

French robotics company, robosoft, has unveiled a new prototype of their fully autonomous passenger transportation system called robuRIDE. The robuRIDE prototype was demonstrated at a recent technical meeting on autonomous transportation. The robuRIDE looks surprisingly low-tech, something like a big white box made out of surplus mobile home parts sitting on a large flatbed dolly. But while it may not score high marks for industrial design, it's already proven itself as an autonomous people-mover. A previous version of the robuRIDE is already in service at Vulcania Park and Simserhof Fort in France. The new prototype can move more than twice as with a top speed of 25 km/h. If all goes well, you can expect to see robuRIDEs zipping around the parking lot of the Rome Exhibition Center in Italy soon. For more see the robosoft press release (PDF format).

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Vex Robotics Competition Report from Lansdale, PA

Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 23:54 UTC (updated 27 Jan 2009 at 16:22 UTC) by steve

Foster Schucker of non-profit educational robotics organization STEMRobotics sent us a report on the recent Vex Robotics scrimmage at Christopher Dock Mennonite High School in Lansdale, PA.

Cheers, groans and loud music filled the Christopher Dock Mennonite High School gymnasium as robotic creations battled is a 12 foot square arena.

Roboteers, coaches and families from Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania filled the gymnasium with robots and teams dressed in colorful costumes. The 18 inch 20 pound metal and plastic robots ranged from Team 555’s simple tank robot to Team 631's ultra complex “Strike Freedom” - a robot capable of picking up 10 cubes at a time.

Foster also sent links to not just one but two galleries full of photos from the event. From the look of it, there are a lot of potential roboticists at Christopher Dock High School. Read on for Foster's full report with more details of the event and the final scores.

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Forknife: A Robot Running Google Android on a G1

Posted 26 Jan 2009 at 16:47 UTC by steve

The Linux-based Google Android phone OS is being used on an HTC G1 phone to control Forknife, a strange little robot with articulated cutlery that seems determined to possess snack cakes despite its complete inability to eat them. Forknife integrates an Arduino microcontroller with the G1 phone using DTMF tones for communication. The robot also communicates with a desktop computer via WiFi, 3G, or EDGE networks. Jeffrey Nelson created an Android app called RoboComm and a PC-based app called RoboServ to pull this off. He also released the code as free software under the GPL so others can use and improve it. For more, see Jeffrey's explanation of the system and his schematic of the control system. We'd love to see what happens when this G1 robot meets the iPhone robot we reported on a few weeks ago!

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Zombie Robots and Reductive Functionalism

Posted 23 Jan 2009 at 17:49 UTC (updated 24 Jan 2009 at 06:36 UTC) by steve

For those who never tire of listening to philosophers argue whether qualia are real or imagined, and whether silicon machines can experience the same qualia as meat machines, you'll enjoy the latest essay from Dr. Jacques Mallah entitled, The Partial Brain Thought Experiment: Partial Consciousness and its Implications (PDF format). Basically, the essay is a defense of physicalism and the idea that consciousness is non-centralized. For those who aren't up on their philosophy, here's what you need to know for this paper to make some sense: Physicalism is the idea that things are made out of stuff (matter and energy) and work the way they do because of the properties of the stuff from which they're made. Functionalism means about the same thing (depending on who you ask). Physicalists spend a lot of time arguing with dualists. Dualists believe either that things are made partially of real stuff and partially of "mental" stuff; or that things are made of real stuff but certain arrangements of real stuff, like meat, have (unreal/non-physical/magical) powers that give rise to mental properties. When these folks argue, the thought experiments frequently involve speculations about robots and other types of zombies (zombies are agents who dualists believe can't experience qualia, not undead agents who hunger for human brains).

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BlimpDuino Competition Planned for Atlanta

Posted 23 Jan 2009 at 01:29 UTC by steve

Vince Wilczynski, of U.S. Coast Guard Academy, wrote to tell us about an upcoming robot blimp competition that uses Open Source hardware and software based on the Arduino board:

University students are invited to participate in the "Aerial Robotics Demonstration" to be held in Atlanta on April 17 & 18 in Atlanta, GA at the Georgia Dome as part of the FIRST Championship. The event involves programming a custom circuit board attached to a small blimp to achieve a series of competition tasks.

The platform that will be used by the university based teams is the BlimpDuino, a very low cost open source autonomous blimp. BlimpDuino consists of an Arduino-based blimp controller board with on-board infrared and ultrasonic sensors and an interface for an optional RC mode, a simple gondola with two vectoring (tilting) differential thrusters, and ground-based infrared beacon. The history of the project is detailed at the project sponsor’s web site (diydrones.com):

Read on for the rest of Vince's announcement with further details of the contest.

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