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.

Robotics Floor = Closest thing to paradise!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, October 11th, 2009

A while ago, I was on the internet TV show – Fat Man and Circuit Girl! At that time, when I showed the robotics floor, we only had a camera and a desk. Now we have everything on the floor, and it’s virtually the closest thing to a paradise!

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.

Posted in: Art, Projects, Robot, School.

Tech Tent!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, July 11th, 2009

If you are in up-state New York today, drop by the Potsdam festival to the Tech Tent!

MANOI will be there playing hockey, and there will be a FRC-like game called Puck Push!

Posted in: MANOI, Other, Projects, Robot, School.

FIRST Finger Lakes Regional 2009 – Photos

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, March 9th, 2009

As per my previous post, there was most definitely more than just words to this entire competition!

It was in Rochester, New York at RIT. The fieldhouse was quite large, which provided a big enough dancefloor for the HS students.

I feel that the playing field for the robots wasn’t big enough. The robots should be smaller. THere wasn’t enough room for them to move or do anything!

This was our robot. I didn’t really help in designing it, but I helped in getting it set up and making some tweaks.

The games were pretty intense, sometimes. We got disqualified from one match because a zip tie was sticking out, and another match we got “static” from crashing into the boards. We made it to semi-finals! Here’s a picture of our alliance drive teams.

And… a picture of the entire team! Woohoo

Just the mentors (I’m on the right)

That was a pretty fun weekend!

Posted in: Projects, School.

FIRST Finger Lakes Regional 2009

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, March 8th, 2009

On March 6th and 7th I was able to experience a FIRST Robotics Competition hands on for the first time! Our team, 229 Division by Zero, competed at the Finger Lakes Regional (FLR) competition in Rochester, NY at RIT.

It was interesting. Since I didn’t really know what to expect, I didn’t have many assigned responsibilities other than to figure out what I wanted to do. There are two main options of things you can do when you are a team mentor:
1) Scouting
2) Helping out in the pit

Scouting is recording all of the statistics of human players on different teams. You have to sit up in the stands with all of your fellow scouters, and record the data. I tried this once and had to bail, I find it hard enough to focus on one robot at a time, let alone count the flying moon rocks from a human player AND see if they go in or not.

Helping out in the pit is mainly what I did. If there was a nut that came loose but couldn’t be reached, I’d help fix it. Programming errors, electrical problems. That sort of stuff. When we got into the elimination round, I helped check to see what battery is most full, and bring it back to the playing field. I must say, I think we were the most well-equipped team with batteries!

It was a great competition! I enjoyed the elimination round very much. We made it to semi-finals, which is quite an achievement! We’re sponsored by the university’s SPEED program, and I’m pretty sure we don’t have any other sponsors. There are some teams out there who are sponsored by NASA!

My main concern though was that it didn’t really feel like a robotics competition, but more or less like a RC car competition. I expect a robotics competition to have AI, and to actually have robotics involved. For this competition, all the parts were machined precisely, and everything was planned out. It just did not feel like a competition of robots.

I was expecting more autonomous, which would make it feel more like a robotics competition. The fact that most of the excitement stemmed from the human players and not the “robots” also enervated me. No one really ‘cared’ about how well the robot was designed. In fact, during the gameplay, it wasn’t really the robots that scored most of the points, it was the human players. How ironic is that?

Maybe it was just a poor game this year. The whole smooth surfaces thing was somewhat cheesy, in my opinion.

I had one notable problem there. I didn’t bring safety glasses, so I always borrowed from the table set up at the entrance to the pits. However, there was one shift where it was not an ordinary person lending out the glasses.

This lady denied me safety glasses!

Yes, this is true! Denied safety glasses! Can there possibly anything more stupid than that? There was a box full with safety glasses! I totally felt like reaching over the table and strangling her, but I didn’t. Instead, I ‘explained’ to her that I always borrowed glasses from here. Eventually the conversation became so ridiculous that I just went in the pit with no safety glasses on. The end of this all was that I ended up borrowing glasses from someone on the team.

My first FIRST competition, and I’m denied safety glasses. Not the best impression… shame on them.

I also was not very enthused how FIRST mentioned the economy and lots of other political mumbo-jumbo in their opening ceremony, and… well, basically during the entire competition.

However, it was fun. It was different. I enjoyed it! Our next competition is in Annapolis, Maryland. Hopefully we will pull off a victory!

Posted in: Projects, School.