The first annual National Robotics Week is from April 10-18!

The Autonomous Robotics Club will have a special hack-a-thon at it’s regular Wednesday meeting time (8:00PM).

We have plenty of things to hack, including some NXTs, a Furby, Tuxdroid, iSobot, Sneezing Lamp Robot, BubbleBoy, MANOI, iRobot Create, NXTcamv3!

If you’re around Clarkson, why don’t you stop by the Autonomous Robotics Club room? Hope to see you there!

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!! ^_^

The PR2 robot is full of amazing and drool-worthy technology. We’re talking about cameras in the arms (which are back drivable) that have a great range of freedom with customizable end-effectors, a base that is mobile and can conquer small obstacles, a modular head with stereo-scopic vision, a 5MP camera, a laser range finder in its neck… and so much software from ROS. For me, I was most surprised about the accessible log hard drive of 1.5 TB, as well as the 2x24GB of RAM. Amazing capability for so much number-crunching power! It’s everything that can be wanted in a high-end research robot!

Clarkson University did send in a letter of intent to the CFP, but didn’t end up submitting the proposal. However, I am able to share the parts of the project that I proposed (and worked on for an incredible amount of time)!

One of the major topics of discussions in robotics today is how to make robots appear as though they can be sociable. To make a robot sociable is to allow it to use natural social cues that interest whomever it’s interacting with– basically giving it an artificial persona. How can we, as designers of robots, make humans believe that the robot has a persona? Why is this important anyway?!?!

In a medical-related field of robotics, where the robot is working with a patient to reach some sort of goal, the patient has to remain optimistic in order for the process to be successful. The presence of an artificial persona within the robot can easily exhibit natural social cues that the patient will understand in order to maintain the level of optimism.

The robot has to appear and behave sociably in order for an artificial persona to be evident and to exhibit understandable social cues to the patient. When the patient understands these social cues, a bond will be created between the patient and robot. By the patient forming a bond with the robot, the process will be transformed into a meaningful task that changes over time as goals are overcome and new problems are tackled.

In order for the robot to exhibit the necessary natural social cues, we envision two main hardware additions that could be made to the PR2 robot:
- Ears, mounted on the top of head bolt-patterns
- Eyebrows, mounted on the side of head bolt-patterns

By allowing the PR2 robot to have ear and eyebrow movements, social cues will be able to be communicated effectively to the patient. This effective communication will be crucial in order for the patient to understand what the robot is trying to express within the process.

Adding two simple features to a robot, ears and eyebrows, adds an incredible amount to the sociable degrees of freedom. It’s so important for a robot to have these added DOF in order to portray that it is an approachable piece of equipment, has a persona and character to it, and is not your everyday robot.

We have to keep in mind that NA culture perceives robots completely differently than that of Japanese culture. In NA, robots are not friendly. In Japan, robots are thought of as heros to humanity. If we can embed the feeling that a robot has some character inside of it, then people will take a different opinion on it. ^_^

Pretty much everyone that I know at Clarkson knew I was trying to write up the proposal for this, and how excited I was at this amazing opportunity! It basically chewed up most of the spare time for 2-ish months (hence no blog posts). It’s sad that we/I never got the chance to show off this idea to WillowGarage via the proposal, but I think some WillowGaragers read this blog… so hopefully they will read this post too, and enjoy it! If any of the winners want to add something like this to their robot, I would be more than happy to help in some way. =)

The ideas in this post are under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Check out the screenshots:

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!

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!

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.

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!

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!

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?

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. ^_^

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

The first problem we faced with this was that it requires 7.2V, in a range of 5.2V – 8.6V. What gives 7.2V?! Crazy! If you take 6 AA rechargeable batteries together, they can add up to be 7.2V exactly. (1.2V * 6 = 7.2V). Battery packs naturally don’t come in sixes, so I ended up making one:

This was actually my first time making a series battery pack. It’s in series because we want to use Ohm’s law, where the voltage is added together. Thanks to the people in the Fat Man and Circuit Girl IRC chat room, they helped me figure it out. Here’s a drawing that I made incase others too need help with this someday. Basically, connect the positive to negative over and over again! ^_^

The next step is to get the camera working. This is by far the hardest part. There’s numerous methods of communicating to the CMUcam2, all of which use RS232. Arduinos also use RS232, so at least we’re in known territory.

The CMUcam2 has a serial port, a TX/RX/Gnd line, and a TTL port. On my Mac, I tried the serial port, it didn’t work. I tried the TX/RX/Gnd line into an Arduino, it also didn’t work. I also tried to use the TTL, but it also didn’t work. I’m not really sure why nothing works on my Mac, especially since the camera works with a PC just fine.

This is where I’m at right now. No idea what to do to make the CMUcam2 work on my Mac. Do any of my blog readers have any ideas?

WOOT~~~ TWIST ENDING!! READ ON!!!

I was thinking that it would be really lame to end the blog post without some sort of screenshot of Matlab or something. So I gave the CMUcam2 another shot… I made it work!!! IT WORKS!!! IT WORKS ON MY MAC!!!!!! =) The code that I was using to test the camera is from Instructables.

So, now that it works we have things to do… like figuring out how we can get the RGB data for each pixel, and then saving that to an image. After its in an image, we can do some form of edge detection. Matlab probably has a toolbox for that. More fun later!

Google thinks that you might like this:

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.

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.

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!

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!

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!)

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

EDIT JULY 4, 2011: Apparently if you add

as the very first line, it handles the serial object deletion issue! WOOT!

Here’s the code that I came up with that works reasonably fast. It doesn’t wait for the buffer to be filled to then store it to a variable. Here, it is asynchronous communication. ^_^

This is a basic screenshot of what you will get, minus the green stars.

Here is the code. Let me know if you use, it would be neat to see what everyone would come up with!
*Note: The code highlighting for Matlab was buggy, so the below is using C code highlighting. Once you paste it into Matlab, it will be fine.

The code for the Arduino is this:

Enjoy, happy matlabbing!

Friday, the FTC competition was amazing! FTC is FIRST Tech Challenge, and it’s where middle school and high school students build robots out of metal and some lego parts. The brain of the robot is an NXT, and they can program it in either RobotC, NXT-G, or LabView with the NXT toolbox.

The field is 12 feet by 12 feet, and this year’s challenge is called HotShot! The robots have to score wiffleballs into the zone in the middle, the nets above the zone, or the containers off to the side of the field. The wiffleballs are released onto the field when a holster tube is pushed. Yellow wiffleballs are better than white wiffleballs.

There’s a 30 second autonomous mode at the beginning of the game, followed by a teleoperated mode. The robots are controlled by a logitech controller that has joysticks and buttons (hahaha, what a lame description), which goes into software called the Field Controller Station. This software is on the laptop that the team supplies. The software then communicates via Bluetooth to the robot.

On the technical side of things, the Bluetooth works great if you have one robot. If you have 40 robots connected with Bluetooth, the air gets too cluttered. We ran into some problems the other day when robots started moving on their own and some teams would be disconnected if they switched from autonomous mode to teleoperated mode.

Problems or not, it was fun. Apparently it ran more smoothly than it did last year, so that was fantastic! Plus, one of the teams that I was helping gave me one of their team t-shirts! The music was great, and the event was streamed live from WCKN onto the internet!

There are 79 pictures that were taken live at the event up on team229robotics.com.

The FLL competition is today, Saturday December 5th. You can tune in to the live stream right here and subscribe to team229robotics.com’s RSS feed to have updated live blogging images as they come in!

The robotics floor is basically a group of people that all really enjoy robotics- we’re all on the FIRST 229 team. We help out with 229 related activities, like remote mentoring. Basically any team that is in our county can call in and ask for help on their robot. I really like the feel of remote mentoring, it’s like being on-call for a robo-emergency. There hasn’t been any calls yet, though The fancy name for the floor is ‘Living Learning Community’… or LL Community. We would say LLC, but I was the nerd who pointed out we could easily be pwned for that, especially if someone had a company called Robotics LLC or Team 229 LLC. Plus, it’s just generally confusing if people look on the website and see a LLC, it wouldn’t make sense- so it’s LL Community. =)

This is the phone we use for remote mentoring. We’re going to be switching to VoIP soon, though:

We have a huge computer that has two displays, an extreme amount of graphical processing power, can record TV shows and has a Netflix account. It’s an amazing computer. The keyboard and mouse are really nice, too.

On top of this, we have a huge smart board! It’s really amazing! It stands up and has a projector sort of floating in front of it. You can touch the screen and it’s like your clicking!!! I tried some of the Processing applications that I made, and it works really good, and the particle finger painting looks extremely realistic!

We also have this intense camera! You can move it around from the internet, and it can zoom in super far, it’s creepy!!!

This is what it looked like with people in it, when it was in its most fire hazardous messy lego state:

It’s much cleaner now, though.

So yeah, that’s the Robotics Floor. I haven’t heard about this type of awesomeness at any other university, so Clarkson has done this first! Woohoo!

So, this floor is so super amazing, but what’s the worst part of it? I’d have to say the respect that the people on the floor have. There’s so little of it that it’s somewhat disgustingly sad

The main problem I have is Quiet Hours. For some reason, everyone on the floor doesn’t understand what QUIET means. So this means that I have to do the RA’s job and tell everyone to shut up, EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. I’ve tried being nice, angry, mean, aggressive, sad, happy, ignoring it, and telling the RA to shut everyone up, but nothing works! They don’t have the courtesy to respect anyone that likes to wake up at the beginning of the morning. How can such an amazing floor have that little respect for its floormates? It disappoints me and bedaffles me!

If I didn’t have respect though… I would play classical music super duper loud on my stereo, each morning, at 6AM. >:D But I haven’t done it yet, because I have respect. I respect people that don’t respect me… that doesn’t make sense. :S

Anyway, during the day this floor is the most amazing place on Earth!! This is what I see out of my window:

I hope that the bad part of the floor will improve, but it’s still the most amazing thing ever.

Here are the two things that I have recently finished writing:
- Awesome Foundation Grant
- Research Abstract

Here are the two things that I need to finish:
- Math presentation
- Final research paper

WOOAH! You know, I think this is sort of the tragic downfall of research. You finish researching feeling like you saved the world (because you did), and now you have to go write so many things that eventually all the words start to sound the same, but if you place them in a different order they have a different meaning.

Here is what I wrote for the Awesome Foundation. It is extremely long (almost 500 words), but I believe my imaginative intro captures some attention. I was trying to go JKR style with Quidditch

In a jolt of electricity, two robots collide in maddening competition to score the game winning
goal. Their batteries are weak, their artificial intelligence is exhausted. Beading with
condensation from the overheating servos, the crowd roars in excitement. Robot #85 from the
Rusty Roboteers dodges the defense and swiftly uses its reinforced learning to predict where the
goalie will be, and SCORES the game winning goal! The 2028 National Robot Hockey League
is won by the Rusty Roboteers for the third straight year.
Taking a step back to the present, the only competitive sport that humanoids participate in is
soccer. Soccer, to some, is an endearing sport full of strategy. To others, it is a game that requires
too much waiting.

What if they could play hockey?

Currently, I am an upcoming freshman majoring in Computer Science at Clarkson University.
My passion is making robots do things that they normally wouldn’t. In particular, I have a
humanoid robot called MANOI that is able to play hockey.

Currently, it has a hockey stick that can detect a puck in front of it, and its ‘skates’ are made out
of lego. It can skate forwards, backwards, left and right.

However, MANOI does not gracefully stride across the ice to score a goal. Instead, it jerkily
moves its leg as it cannot take the risk of falling over, as it has no sensors to sense it if it is
falling or not.

This is a problem because I cannot advance any further with the current supplies. It is easy to
foresee that one day, MANOI will be able to skate graciously. In order to reach this goal, it needs
some additional supplies to be able to do so.

For instance, if I am fortunate enough to win this $1000, I could buy some servos to allow
MANOI to have extra degrees of freedom to move its legs more and take strides. Additionally, I
could add wrists to MANOI to add some flick shots! Many precise gyro sensors could be
purchased to monitor the key servos and employ reinforcement learning to make the skating
motions more optimal for speed, strength, and stability.

When MANOI is able to skate graciously, it will be truly awesome because it would mean that
robots have reached another stage of mobility. At that stage, ultimately, the possibilities of this
are endless.

One of my grand visions is an inspirational exhibit during an NHL game where miniature hockey
robots would be skating around and playing a game, autonomously. The goal would be to inspire
young hockey fans to pursue an education in science, while excelling at sports.

By inspiring the younger generation, we can ensure that more awesomeness will follow in the
years to come, and keep the cycle of inspiration flowing!

I hope it is awesome enough to catch some attention, and maybe even win! The cool thing about this is that I am happy with what I wrote. When I was writing my abstract, it was important to realize, and make others realize, that it really doesn’t matter if it is 100%. If the person writing it is happy with it, then it will go a longer way than if it is 100%.

I must return to more intense finger poking, but I am planning to take a MAKEation for the first three weeks in August! It would be neat to set a goal of blogging every day.