Rodney’s Robot Revolution

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, November 1st, 2008

There was a pretty awesome TV special a few nights ago- Rodney’s Robot Revolution. It was on “The Nature of Things”. Here’s the summary they give on their site:

As former head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Professor Brooks is once again going to test his robot-building mettle with what has become the most challenging project of his entire career: to build a robot for the Pentagon capable of playing an ancient Chinese board game of GO against a human opponent. Brooks has only five months to build it from scratch, making his challenge that much more outrageous.

The premise of the show surrounded Rodney Brook’s project for the government- to build a social robot that will play go…. in nine months! (For some reason the CBC website says 5 months, but I clearly heard 9 months, three or four times).
I think he did have some students help- at least he did with the hand part that needed to pick up the pieces. The hand consisted of two fingers, with special force sensing resistors on them. The fingers was pretty good at first- it worked often. Afterwards, they placed a cover on the two fingers with bumps on it so that the piece would remain grasped until placed onto the board. It didn’t work often- it couldn’t pick up the pieces.

The other main parts of the robot was the computer vision. It used two off the shelf logitech cameras as eyes, and it had a few more stationary cameras around to get different views of the board. The eyes were mounted on a metal part that served as a face, which could move. At one point, the robot almost fell off the table because the movements were too quick, and not fluid.

The only part that seemed a little wonky was when they mentioned that robotics is a competitive industry. The jist of the message was that other places like Google, Sony, and Honda are competing with MIT’s robotics. I kind of laughed at that… as MIT is a university, not a company. They weren’t just comparing an apple with an orange, they were comparing an apple with a pineapple. Either way, Sony’s Aibo robot is a distant past, and Asimo has sort of been around for a long time- just evolving and improving! As for Google… errrrr. I thought we were talking about physical robots here? Lol! I think what they meant to portray was that there are other places that are R&D’ing robotics.

The part that I found quite interesting was that even though each of the “sections” of the robot worked okay- like the hand, the computer vision, the algorithms, they weren’t combined to work with each other very well. What I mean by that is… there was too much focus on creating the basics perfectly, instead of just building a simple model first, and improving on it with milestones. If it would have been done this way, there would have been something to demonstrate at the end that would work. It’s better to have something that works, even though it doesn’t meet the requirements, than something that meets the requirements but doesn’t work.

First start off with giving the robot the piece, and start off with all the cameras stationary. The robot can still be sociable even if the cameras aren’t in the eyes (for some reason, this seems to be a common misjudgment). Once that stage is working, make a hand that will have to move the piece. Then make it pick up the piece. After that works, then go on to moving the cameras, and finish up by adding a sociable touch.

It’s almost like the difference between the old macbookpros and the new ones. The old ones were created by putting pieces together, the new ones are created by taking material away. My suggested method is like taking all the possible difficulties away, one by one. If you only put pieces together, you’ll miss out on many opportunities to improve and optimize the robot. Additionally, there were no backup plans. If the robot didn’t have a pebble, it wouldn’t go back to pick another one up. It happens all the time in games between humans… the pieces are small and glossy, seriously!

9 months (or even 5 months) is a lot of time- especially when you have all the resources, and people that are eager to help out.

If I would have built the robot, I would have used an octopus-like suction cup to pick up one of the pieces. The location of the cameras would have been different… and the base would be bigger so it wouldn’t tip over. Plus, my method would have been different, as discussed above.

There’s another neat TV show soon, Five Years on Mars! National Geographic channel, Sunday Nov 2!
Don’t forget about Daily Planet too… my fav TV show that’s on at 7pm each weekday (Discovery Channel)

Posted in: News, Robot News.

Friday Night Robotics

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 12th, 2008

My Friday night robotics are BACK! Throughout the week I was working on speech recognition… Friday I took a bit of a break and soldered up the Motor Shield!
The Motor Shield is pretty awesome since it has 2 H-bridges. Soldering it up was pretty fun- even with a melted soldering iron!

Once it was all soldered up… I first tried the servos. Their motion is so much stronger than the servos I’m using in BubbleBoy! I’m going to try to use ServoTimer library on BubbleBoy again (previous attempts have been extremely frustrating). Maybe he’ll be more “emo”

The DC motors scared me as I extremely didn’t expect them to work the first time! Which is sort of ironic because, even though they did work, I didn’t have them plugged in right, so they didn’t move backwards. The solution was to not over-think it, and just plug it in (Like below)

The motors went to the GearBox, externally powered with +3V. The batteries were slowly fading away, so it became kinda fun to spin the gears

I made a video of my fingers spinning the gears (rofl):

So yeah… this is great! I’m probably going to make a shield for a RBBB to attach the motor sheild. Or something like that. I need to get one of those rechargable batteries wrapped in lime green shrink wrap as all of the motors will be powered. (There’s 4 of them!) It’s going to be a really powerful robot O_O

Oh yeah! I’m not sure what I did to my camera *coughdroppeditcough* but it takes REALLY nice pictures now… it does the effect that I’ve been trying to achieve on macro for ages now- softens the background a lot, crisp in the front (you can see it in the soldering iron pic). Yay!!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Stuff!!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Thanks to very kind people, I had a $200 gift certificate at Adafruit and was able to buy stuff!

• Arduino
• 2 ProtoShields
• Arduino bootloader
• Multimeter
• Boarduino
• Motor Shield
• Wave Shield

All of these are going to be extremely helpful @_@ In fact, the old multimeter broke just the other day

What’s a little cool is that the Arduino now has Italy on the back! Someone who had the Arduino at Stanford also had this style, so I guess it’s kind of cool that I had one of the Arduino Dicemilas without the map The motor shield sounds a lot of fun… as does the wave shield! I’m not sure which ones I’ll put together and test first…
Either way, I now have lots of interesting stuff to keep me entertained for a while longer
Thanks Ron & Evelyn!!!
(and I hope I won’t blow any of them up)

Posted in: Other, Projects, Robot.

Go Phoenix Go!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, May 25th, 2008

Here’s to the new Mars rover!

I hope it lands, but it does use retro rockets instead of airbags… so if they do pull it off, well done to them!

NASA TV starts broadcasting the event at 6:00pm EDT. I can’t wait!!!

Posted in: News, Other News, Tech News.

Friday Night MANOI! (Replaced by Bubble Boy, again)

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, April 12th, 2008

Bubble Boy is finished!

I just have to add some finishing touches! I’m envisioning a top hat (like the one on Frosty the snowman), and googly eyes and a biiiiiig smile.
Here is the video:

Here are some pictures- I didn’t take many though!

That’s all for this week. It was a pretty exciting week, though!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Bubble Boy WORX!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, April 6th, 2008

Energy is the ability to do WORX! Meaning that… Bubble Boy works.
Here is a video- (with more funky music!)

And pictures-

Hiphip Hooray!

What I had to do to get it to work was stagger the servos. Then I put lots of hot glue into the holes that were punctured into the styrofoam so everything was secure. After that, I plugged in 4 paperclips and attached them to wire which attached to separate sides of the two servo horns. YIPEE!

Oh yes- although this post was published on April 11th, the content was actually from April 5th.
Friday Night MANOI (Replaced by Bubble Boy Again) will be up sometime this weekend due to my HW schedule Keep an eye out for it

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

Female Robot Leader Honored

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, February 24th, 2008

With the U.N. International Women’s Day coming up on March 8th, the Japan Times ran a special series in this Sunday edition highlighting "… the astonishing progress being made against considerable odds by women in Japan working in a wide variety of scientific fields, long thought to be the sole preserve of men."

They selected six women who represent "Japan’s brightest stars in the fields of science, technology and medicine, ranging from geophysics and cancer treatment to biodiversity and robotics." We were very pleased to find that one of these six wonderful women was our own robotics ’sensei’, mentor, and friend, Yukiko Nakagawa, the founder of RT Corporation.

Congratulations Nakagawa-san! It’s a well deserved honor!

Well done to her! That is quite a feat! After reading about her, she is definitely one of the people whom I will see as a role-model for now on.

Link.

Woah! The RT Corp store has some pretty awesome stuff!

Hats for MANOI! *freaks out with joy*

Sofa for MANOI! *squeaal*

So cool! I can definitely see my MANOI needing those.

On a more serious note, this article is an interesting read.

Then there is the "attractiveness" factor. As robotics expert Yukiko Nakagawa points out, "Girls are considered ‘uncute’ if they go on a date to a science museum and if they know more about the exhibits there than boys."

…Wow much? Going to a science museum would be pretty cool, in my opinion! I don’t understand how women can like science less than men. Is there really that big of a difference? What makes a person different from one another are their decisions and personality! No one has to strictly conform to tradition. I like science and robotics because of the challenges! At the time, I had no clue when I bought my MANOI that it was one of the toughest athlete humanoids. But, with a little ‘work’ — I put work in quotes as it isn’t work since it is FUN, but physically it is work since I am exerting energy to create a force… — it’s going to be alright! I’ll have to figure out the gyros at a later date though. And, I did get it to walk last weekend instead of moonwalking forwards. *thumbs up*

I cannot wait to blog about my science fair project!! Keep a lookout for a post and a page on March 5th! It is really going to change the way humans and machines interact with eachother.

Until then, I’ll still be adding more to it.

Posted in: MANOI, News, Programming, Projects, Robot, Robot News, Tech News.

Really OLD Robot Roundup

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, October 21st, 2007

Here are the articles lingering around in my Vienna (a feedreader for macs) which are beginning to lag the app.
A robot invasion - DARPA
NASA Tests Robot Surgeon for Missions to Moon, Mars
Robo-doctors arrive in Canada
Anybots: Building your robot army
JAPAN’S TOMY DEVELOPS TINY PITCH-SENSITIVE DANCING TURTLE ROBOT
RoboFest Hawaii
Yoky Matsuoka Wins $500k Genius Grant
Sensing Squeeze
She’s Geeky: Women-in-tech (un)conference
Bryn Mawr Computer Scientist Is a P.I. in $2.5 Million Humanoid-Robot Project
Honda’s ASIMO Humanoid Robot Is On His Way
Young minds make machines talk the walk at robot show
Predicting the future of the past tense
Blog Action Day 2007
Contest asks kids to craft a lunar rover
Electronic Breadboard Templates
Exclusive: First Look At RoboPhilo In Action (Video)
Students Simulate Evolution of Thinking Robots
Robot Cannon Kills 9, Wounds 14
Robots show off their mettle
Mentor steers team building robot car
Sugiura Brothers: Growing Up With Robots (Video)
Long-lived Mars Rovers to Keep on Roving
iHobby Expo: Early RoboPhilo Photos

That’s all!

Posted in: News, Other News, Robot News, Tech News.