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.

Friday Night Robotics – MLK Day Preparations

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, January 16th, 2010

Warning: This FNR does not contain any robots at all, but it’s still REALLY amazing!

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!

Posted in: Animation, Art, Other, Programming, Projects.

Friday Night Robotics – Competitions all weekend long!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, December 5th, 2009

For FNR this week, there are many competitions going on! Thursday was Physics I Team Design Lab Challenge Sessions, Friday was a FTC Competition and Saturday is a FLL Competition! After Saturday is the competition that is the most worthless but “necessary” … final exam(s).

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!

Posted in: 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.

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.