MANOI dancing to Yankadi

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, March 6th, 2010

Near the beginning of the Spring 2010 semester, a small activities fair was hosted for various clubs at Clarkson University. Autonomous Robotics Club originally didn’t have a table, but the orchestra let us have a little piece of theirs… Coincidentally, it was right near the Yankadi (west African drumming) club!

MANOI was running the Holiday Xtravaganza program, which made it look like it was ringing its bells in tune to the music!!! It was a really interesting sight to see, music from a robot and music from a group interacting together!

Here is a short video of some clips (mainly focussing on MANOI) of the event:

Music is a form of nonverbal communication, says Captain Obvious. So, it would be really worthwhile in the future to research how robots and humans can interact together through music. Perhaps in some elder care homes, drumming in a group with their personal robot (pets) can be a possibility! Maybe it wouldn’t be as intense drumming as this– it could be playing on a balafon or something.

The current elder generation has been closely tied with music… the radio was really popular back then, TVs weren’t all that common yet. Introducing personal robots into this type of a scenario would make sense, it wouldn’t be too intimidating for the elders since they have been accustomed to music for a very long time.

Here are two more videos of MANOI and Yankadi:

Yankadi is really great music activity since it’s so creative and doesn’t require any rhythm at all (if you’re playing in a big group). Plus, the sound is amazing!

Art and technology!!

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot, School.

CMUcam2 in Matlab! & Project updates!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

On Sunday, a breakthrough was made with regards to getting the CMUcam2 to send a frame back to Matlab! Amazing! It works!

Check out the screenshots:

(something bright was being shone onto the camera)

(lens cap on (yes they make lens caps that small))

It’s quite noticeable that the resolution is very small. In fact, it’s only about 10 pixels in size!

I started off small so that we could have something that works, then go from there. It’s only sending the green channel too, which helps improve the latency.

The way it works now is that it asks for a few hundred bytes of data. From there, we search through the array to find a 1, or the start of the frame, until a 3, or the end of the frame. This is stored into a new variable so that we can search through it (again!) and plot the data.

Plotting the data needs some improvement. Not too sure how to handle this yet– should I make a Processing app that will be able to save the image as a .png? Or can Matlab write images too? Hmm!

Post a comment if you want me to post the code, I just don’t want to post something that’s incomplete and will essentially confuse everyone.

Other projects statii:

PR2 Proposal

Out of the 120 Letters of Intent that WillowGarage received for the PR2 Beta program, one of them is one from Clarkson University!

There are ten robots that are going to be given away. Coincidentally, the research teams that win will be notified on March 26th — that’s the date of the Boston FIRST regional (which Team 229 is attending and is going to ROCK THE ROBOT HOUSE)!

We’re giving it our best shot, and it’s looking really cool! If you see me around, ask me about it!

This whole process has been super exciting. Our proposal is being wrapped up, though it’s only due March 1st (that’s in six days, we still have plenty of time). My two sections are pretty much complete except for some stuff. I’ll be blogging about it on March 1st at 8:00PM, so keep an eye out!

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Sociable Robotics

The Socializing a Social Robot with an Artificial Society SURE abstract from the summer has been added to the Honors Summer Research 2009 page! Finally!

Also, I refined my paper with logic that can easily be followed now, and included Zoomify graphs of the results. This makes it easy for readers to scan and interpret the graphs themselves. Plus, Zoomify graphs are always fun.

As for the code… I still have to get on to documenting it. It’s a lot of work, so I’m just getting through it step by step. Lesson learned: although comments are distracting when you’re working on the code, it’s horrible to go back and then spend time to comment it. Always comment. No exceptions!

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SecondLife Statistics Project

We finally parsed through the data and found something really striking. When the economic downturn in real life appeared, the usage hours on SecondLife rose, and kept on rising for a few months! The virtual economy was booming. It’s almost like as if people were tired of the real life, and wanted the easy success of the virtual world.

Though, there was eventually a decrease in the usage hours on SecondLife. This leads us to wonder if…
1) Is there a lag between RL and SL?
2) Did people notice that there weren’t as many opportunities on SL as when they first joined?

It’s really cool to think about this sort of stuff. It makes you wonder what Oreo sales have been like throughout this modern recession. I would love to study Oreo sales, I think they would be really representative of the economic situations. Either that, or Oreo sales always remain constant.

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Team 229

This build season I helped out with the website a lot. We were coming from nothing, and now we have a beautiful source of information, all collected together!

It was quite a load of work, however help from the teammates and mentors helped very much. Go check it out!

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Physics Team Design

In Physics II there are two lab sections that allow you to participate in a team based design course. The challenge is to model the velocity of a hobby train with given voltages. We do this using photogates… and a piece of National Instruments hardware that measures data at a rate of 400,000. I’m not sure what the units are, but it’s pretty amazing! The challenge sessions are where we apply this model, trying to predict the train’s movements based on the data that we have collected.

The way the data is collected is through LabView. Unfourtunately, the program that is used was deleted… so the professor/TA needed some help to fix it. After working on it for a few hours, we figured it out and got it to work!

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iPhone Stuff

I’ve been playing around with core-plot and working on an app lately- it’s 80% done, and will be out on the App store within the next few weeks!

We’re still trying to sort out if we’re going to Open Source it, and how that would work (since we want people to buy the App too…!). Perhaps we could just *suggest* a donation whenever people try to download the code? Anyone have any experience with Open Source App business model plans?

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Random

Coming back from winter break to school was tricky this time around… since I was outside the entire day playing hockey during the break!!! Although Clarkson has open skate, their ice mixture is really weird, and there’s no pickup hockey games Better than nothing, though.

I bought two shirts from shirt.woot, and they are awesome. One of them is ‘I Fought the Laws’, and has three pictures of crazy robots. The other is a robot that is plugged in to a wall outlet, leading to its heart.

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That’s all for now! Keep it real, humans and robots.

Posted in: Art, Other, Programming, Projects, Robot, School.

January Happenings

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, February 1st, 2010

What has happened in January? Tons of stuff!

For Matlab this semester, it’s an independent project. I’m working with a friend to implement an adaptive online SLAM algorithm for an iRobot with a CMU cam and ultrasonic sensor. We want it to be able to reach a goal location even if objects are placed in front of it. I’ll be blogging more about this later, though.

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The Social Robotics software that I worked on over the summer is now released under the GPLv3 license. I encourage everyone to check out the Social Robotics page if you want to learn more about the project! I am still in the process of creating the documentation and commenting for the code. As soon as it is complete, I will make a blog post.

Luckily for me, I took time to make detailed daily and weekly summaries. This will help a lot, plus it’s always neat to look back and see what the difficult parts were.

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Did you hear/watch this year’s FIRST game animation? The game is about soccer! Team 229 has many useful links on their webpage that can fill you in.

This year I’m helping out with the website, maybe I will get to help out with some AI coding for the autonomous mode later on. It all depends on what the high school students think up!

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I ended up adding a class two hours before the first lecture- Applied Statistics I. I don’t enjoy statistics very much since I have horrible memories of it from Math 536. But, once I gained access to view the class on the gradebook software, I immediately noticed two words:

SecondLife ……………… Project

Is this for real!?!?! It turned out that it is, and it is awesome! A friend and I are working on trying to figure out if there is a correlation between the virtual economy and the real economy. We’re going to focus mainly on North & South America, Europe and Australia.

Here’s a screenshot of my professor in SecondLife!

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I’m taking a class on Computer Graphics. It’s really neat– I’m learning OpenGL!

OpenGL is something that I’ve wanted to learn for a while now. It’s actually quite simple when you’re given a template to work with!

Above is the first homework assignment! We were given a lot of time with it, which allowed me to play around with the code. I have to make the colours more plain before I hand it in, though.

I have no idea what I want to make with OpenGL at the moment. Maybe a moving robot? I definitely want to make some sort of game, though. (That way I can sell it on the iPhone App Store!)

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That’s all for now. I’ll be blogging more about the Matlab project, since I think it’s going to be a hit!

Posted in: Animation, Art, Programming, Projects, Robot, School.

MANOI in 2010 and beyond +

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, January 7th, 2010

2009 was a pretty good year in terms of getting MANOI to do stuff! I figured out how to make MANOI write, walk, and dance around and be on TV. I have a pretty good template for programming MANOI too, and it seems quite rugged. 2009 also gave me the chance to learn the limitations of this robot, that being the knee servos.

I was always under the impression that “great” humanoid robots can walk, run, and kick very well, basically being the best robots in RoboCup. MANOI will never be a RoboCup robot, since the knees are too weak and the stronger knees cost $300 a piece. I realized this a few months ago, admitting it is sort of harder

But, MANOI can be an interactive robot and do funny things… so in 2010, I’m going to focus more on the appearance and movements of MANOI. I want it so that the person interacting with MANOI can become attached to it, feeling that it exhibits an actual persona, instead of a programmed robot. I really feel that this was evident in MANOI’s Holiday Xtravaganza, but it still needs some improvements.

The first few steps would be to decorate MANOI’s head with two ears and two eyebrows. I’m considering antennae instead of eyebrows, because I don’t really want MANOI to come off as an uncanny human, but rather a friendly alien. I already have the two servos needed for the ears, so I’ll probably do those first.

Getting various sensor data will also be key in making MANOI more sociable. Currently there are three sensors on MANOI- the IR sensor, the gyro, and a LDR which is used for shaking hands. I’m thinking that those sensors alone are going to useful enough, for the time being.

It might be cool to have MANOI communicate back to a Mac so that the computer could produce audible results (like my Robbie the Robot science fair project).

There’s lots of possibilities out there, so this is pretty much a blog post of my scrambled thoughts. 2010 will be interesting, for sure!

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Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

MANOI’s Holiday Xtravaganza

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, December 24th, 2009

HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO EVERYONE!!!

Posted in: Art, MANOI, Projects, Robot.