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!!

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!

A while ago I put my name on a list that wanted to help out with MLK day, 2010. I originally thought I would be doing a website, not really thinking about the intractability portion. When the Fall 2009 semester began, the group of us met, and ideas were tossed around. MLK Day in 2010 had to be different.

We came up with the idea of having a Twitter aspect of the performance. People would be able to tweet from laptops and then see it displayed on the screen! We are going to be using 5 laptops throughout the dinner, each with a different theme:

• Inspiration
• Dedication
• Culture
• Leadership
• Performance

When a person goes to send a tweet, this is what the webpage looks like:

It’s very user-friendly in the way that… once a person reads the theme and the question, they’ll understand to type in the box and press the button. I designed it to be simple, hopefully people will think it is simple too.

Being projected onto the display will be the Processing application that I’ve spent the better part of 4 months coding! :O It displays three twitter accounts at a time, and they are refreshed every 10 seconds and cycled upwards. The background changes very slowly over time as well, it’s almost not noticeable. Here is a screenshot:

The best part about this is… it will be open source… in about 1 month. I just need to take some time to document it before I release it to the wild. Since it wasn’t a project for grades, I didn’t comment it (I find comments get in the way), so I will have to do that. Hopefully people will pick it up and improve it, since there’s some parts in the code that it’s obvious that I had no idea what I was doing.

So that is the MLK Twitter portion of the dinner. I’m really amazed how well this is all going to work together, it will be a very special moment for sure. I had the privilege of seeing the performance being rehearsed, it is extraordinary! If it is going to be recorded, I will be sure to post a video.

I hope everyone has a wonderful MLK day!

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!

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!

On December 17th, MANOI made its TV-screen ‘debut’ to gazillions of viewers in Canada! Daily Planet, a news style of a show for DIY’ers and scientists, featured MANOI’s holiday Xtravaganza warmup in the PlanetYou clip!

You can see the clip online by clicking here. It’s after the iPhone App part.

It was pretty awesome to see MANOI on TV, and a great way to ring out the year. WOOT!

The actual version of MANOI’s Holiday Xtravaganza will be posted soon

Last year, MANOI barely showed off any holiday spirit. Just a seemingly 2D stocking sticky-tacked onto its head.

This year I really wanted to improve on that because… well, I don’t really have a reason. I just wanted to. I wanted to see what it would be like for MANOI to ring bells

The decorating started off with just a hat, followed by the hunt to find jingle bells that are a circle, not a bell. My mom eventually figured out the type of bell that I was looking for, and bought me some festive bells and bows!

Et voila, MANOI! C’est magnifique! (Tada, MANOI is magnificent!)

I spent an enormous amount of time getting various actions set up so that I can string them together into a final product. In total, there are 7 different movements. My favourite of which, called ‘tango’ can be seen in the video below where one of MANOI’s arms is outwards, and another is inwards, perpendicular to its front shell with the bow. Surprisingly enough, its only two motion frames:

It’s weird because tango looks way more complicated than a movement that has 6 frames, the ‘both arm jingle’. This is where MANOI jingles both of its arms, so one is back and the other is forwards, then the hands both jingle.

Crazy right? I’ve found that in most of my other MANOI motions, the movement was very focused, with no other moving parts. So I made sure to make the most things move at once. I think it gives off a more exciting vibe. Check out the video!

It really wasn’t as easy as the video makes it look. There were a lot of times where various movements wouldn’t match up, so they would catch the balance off-guard. Also, one of MANOI’s ankle servos went crazy on me, so it let the other foot down, causing a fall.

It’s super challenging to fix this because when MANOI falls, there are at least two things that temporarily break. You fix those things, but while you’re fixing them, other things break. While you’re trying to fix the new things, you can’t get a good grip on the robot because its entire body is made up of servos, and if you set the robot down, another thing will break. I would be willing to wager that working in no-gravity is a cinch compared to this!

Once everything is working again, you go and fix the motion. Fixing the motion is a whole separate routine of trial and error- you change some of the values of the servos and see what happens. There are two options for the next step, either have super fast reflexes, or only program with one hand on the keyboard. Since macs are not very one hand friendly, I have to have super fast reflexes to turn the power switch off on MANOI so that it won’t fall. If it does fall, you have to go back and fix everything.

In any case, once the motion is fixed, you go back and try it with the other movements. Just your luck, the battery runs out! MANOI falls, and you have to fix everything again.

It’s so unbelievably frustrating!! Especially doing it for 3 days straight! There have been three times where MANOI has fallen off the table, about 1 meter (3 feet) tall. The risk of this is MANOI getting shocked by me, the air, and the carpet! It’s really nerve wracking, but thankfully MANOI is alright. Here’s a video of all of MANOI’s falls from the various videos that I tried to take:

At the end of the day, I really enjoy seeing MANOI move around. I think of it this way: it is my frustration and patience that has given an otherwise inanimate object LIFE. How cool is that?

There will be more videos of MANOI in its holiday gear showing up soon, with more blinky lights too!