Rodney’s Robot Revolution

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, November 1st, 2008

There was a pretty awesome TV special a few nights ago- Rodney’s Robot Revolution. It was on “The Nature of Things”. Here’s the summary they give on their site:

As former head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Professor Brooks is once again going to test his robot-building mettle with what has become the most challenging project of his entire career: to build a robot for the Pentagon capable of playing an ancient Chinese board game of GO against a human opponent. Brooks has only five months to build it from scratch, making his challenge that much more outrageous.

The premise of the show surrounded Rodney Brook’s project for the government- to build a social robot that will play go…. in nine months! (For some reason the CBC website says 5 months, but I clearly heard 9 months, three or four times).
I think he did have some students help- at least he did with the hand part that needed to pick up the pieces. The hand consisted of two fingers, with special force sensing resistors on them. The fingers was pretty good at first- it worked often. Afterwards, they placed a cover on the two fingers with bumps on it so that the piece would remain grasped until placed onto the board. It didn’t work often- it couldn’t pick up the pieces.

The other main parts of the robot was the computer vision. It used two off the shelf logitech cameras as eyes, and it had a few more stationary cameras around to get different views of the board. The eyes were mounted on a metal part that served as a face, which could move. At one point, the robot almost fell off the table because the movements were too quick, and not fluid.

The only part that seemed a little wonky was when they mentioned that robotics is a competitive industry. The jist of the message was that other places like Google, Sony, and Honda are competing with MIT’s robotics. I kind of laughed at that… as MIT is a university, not a company. They weren’t just comparing an apple with an orange, they were comparing an apple with a pineapple. Either way, Sony’s Aibo robot is a distant past, and Asimo has sort of been around for a long time- just evolving and improving! As for Google… errrrr. I thought we were talking about physical robots here? Lol! I think what they meant to portray was that there are other places that are R&D’ing robotics.

The part that I found quite interesting was that even though each of the “sections” of the robot worked okay- like the hand, the computer vision, the algorithms, they weren’t combined to work with each other very well. What I mean by that is… there was too much focus on creating the basics perfectly, instead of just building a simple model first, and improving on it with milestones. If it would have been done this way, there would have been something to demonstrate at the end that would work. It’s better to have something that works, even though it doesn’t meet the requirements, than something that meets the requirements but doesn’t work.

First start off with giving the robot the piece, and start off with all the cameras stationary. The robot can still be sociable even if the cameras aren’t in the eyes (for some reason, this seems to be a common misjudgment). Once that stage is working, make a hand that will have to move the piece. Then make it pick up the piece. After that works, then go on to moving the cameras, and finish up by adding a sociable touch.

It’s almost like the difference between the old macbookpros and the new ones. The old ones were created by putting pieces together, the new ones are created by taking material away. My suggested method is like taking all the possible difficulties away, one by one. If you only put pieces together, you’ll miss out on many opportunities to improve and optimize the robot. Additionally, there were no backup plans. If the robot didn’t have a pebble, it wouldn’t go back to pick another one up. It happens all the time in games between humans… the pieces are small and glossy, seriously!

9 months (or even 5 months) is a lot of time- especially when you have all the resources, and people that are eager to help out.

If I would have built the robot, I would have used an octopus-like suction cup to pick up one of the pieces. The location of the cameras would have been different… and the base would be bigger so it wouldn’t tip over. Plus, my method would have been different, as discussed above.

There’s another neat TV show soon, Five Years on Mars! National Geographic channel, Sunday Nov 2!
Don’t forget about Daily Planet too… my fav TV show that’s on at 7pm each weekday (Discovery Channel)

Posted in: News, Robot News.

Prizes? For me? Wow!!!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, October 20th, 2008

Apparently I won a prize for placing 10th in the DVICE MAKE Cylon competition!! =D
I got a MAKE the FIRST YEAR (autographed) boxed set of 4 zines, and a 1 year sub to SciFi mag! !!

The SciFi mag has Chuck in it… coool!!

That made my day! Definitely worth paying the $30 for shipping. At least I got a prize!! (Remember: I wasn’t even eligible to enter this competition) =P!

~~~

So yeah… my robot (MANOI, with the Arduino-SSC-32 to Processing program) WAS working, now it isn’t. I’m not entirely sure what I changed :X! Debugging again and again…

Posted in: News, Other News, Projects, Robot.

Festive Styrobotz

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, October 6th, 2008

Custom Styrobots are really fun to make… and they cost the same price ($20). A friend wanted a yellow Styrobot, with green hair with a comb in it, two combs on the cup, and a poem. It was pretty fun to make! Despite the rotation of the pics being messed up… here are some pictures!

The poem on the back is ‘The Road not Taken’ by Robert Frost. It’s a pretty good poem Here are morrrre pictures!

Great eh! There will be 3 NEW Styrobots appearing in my store very soon They’re all Hallowe’en themed.

In my opinion, Battygoo is really cute ^_^ as are the other ones! Asside from that… MANOI is aliiiive! I’m currently in the middle of making a program to set its home position.

So keep an eye out… the Styrobots will be poppin’ into the shop very soon =D

Posted in: MANOI, News, Projects, Robot, Robot News.

Stanford’s Version of MIT OCW

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 19th, 2008

Looks like Stanford has their own version of MIT OCW with some neat courses up! It’s called Stanford Engineering Everywhere.

I’m just looking at the Machine Learning course now… it looks pretty fun – definitely worth checking out

SEE

Posted in: News, Other News.

BubbleBoy is not Characterful

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 12th, 2008

FUDGE!

BubbleBoy did not win, nor PLACE in crabfu’s ‘Most Characterful’ competition.

I don’t understand how it didn’t…
My source and schematics are even open!!

This extremely sucks as I wanted to win so badly as I don’t have the money to buy a serial servo controller Fudge!!
Will MANOI forever be in a box? Talk about unethical treatment to a robot…
(You wouldn’t keep a cat in a box* for a month would you?! why would a robot be any different?!)
* Schrodinger’s cat is an exception

I guess I poured too much creativity and florescent pink and lime green paint into it >:( Grr! Either that, or it doesn’t even count as a robot since it doesn’t show its wires.

Although it is only “one contest” it was only an EXTREMELY GIGANTICOR SUPER DUPER CONTEST that I really wanted to win so I can work on my other robot so I can win other contests so I can pay for parts to keep researching robotics!!!!

sigh…

Posted in: News, Robot News.

Today…

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Today is a pretty happy day! ^_^ It’s sunny out, and it’s my birthday! I didn’t get any presents, but that’s okay I did something that I wanted to do for a while now… I still haven’t finished blogging all of my pics from the Stanford EPGY SI AI trip!

The last place I went to while in California was the JPL! It was really amazing! Our tourer works on Deep Space. Uber cool!

Click continue reading to see the pics

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in: News, Other News.

Put on your Sunday Clothes

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, August 24th, 2008

I actually bought the real Wall-E soundtrack, since I like it so much! It’s uber cool… it comes in a recycled material case

At first, I thought the movie was medium… it wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad. The whole dystopian/furturistic evolution of people as they became more dependent on technology really freaked me out. The hover chairs and BNL were the main sources of that. They should have taken better care of the planet- cans could have been recycled, along with all the other garbage.
One of the quotes that stands out in my mind is…

Auto: “On the Axiom, you will survive”
Captain: “I don’t want to survive, I want to live!”

But… everyone is really liking it – except for me!! WHYy? I think I figured it out…
If I didn’t know about dystopian societies, like in Handsmade Tale, 1984, Brave New World… then I wouldn’t have thought that it would be dystopian (which I automatically connect with BAD) but instead, futuristic.
If I wasn’t anticipating a cheesy ‘Hello Dave’ joke with Auto, I wouldn’t have been disappointed, ha.
If I didn’t know that creating robots with emotions as complex as in Eve & WALL-E, then I wouldn’t have taken a ‘that’s almost impossible’* attitude.
*it’s actually not too much ‘that’s almost impossible’, it would just need complex AI, even a form of general AI.

I could go on, but really the point is is that WALL-E is a really awesome movie if I didn’t know… . Now that I realize that, it is a pretty good movie I’m for sure buying the 3 DVD set.

The soundtrack is amazing too… everyone should spend the extra few dollars to buy it in real

Posted in: Animation News, News, Other News.