Aug 11, 2007
The meeting minutes are also available in PDF format.
Class
Bruce Weimer and Steven Gentner gave a presentation on Localization and Navigation, emphasizing the use of visual data. Bruce began the presentation with mathematical approaches to analysis of visual data.
Steven followed up with demonstrations of new functionality which he has added to his Roborealm visual processing software package (roborealm.com). New functions included image stabilization. The stabilization works in both the vertical and horizontal axes as well as rotation. He demonstrated this with a short movie taken while walking around carrying a webcam. The raw movie showed quite a bit of rocking motion due to the walking. The stabilized image was much smoother.
Steven showed a new feature, which he called “Visual anchor” in which a colored marker can be placed on the webcam image; and then the marker remains on the same point in the image even though the camera may be moved about. The marker has a size that is related to the relative distance to the apparent location of the marker. As the camera approaches or backs up , the size of the marker increases or decreases. This allows an estimate of range. Steven showed this, as implemented in the robot below, which placed a marker on the wall in front of it and then moved forward, tracking toward the marker, until the marker had doubled in size. The robot had moved about half the distance to the marker as would be expected. This presentation will be continued next month.
Business meeting
Bruce mentioned that the new mail list had not been set up yet. Brian Lojeck is going to do so as soon as he can contact Jerry Woods to get access to his server.
Upcoming contests will include:
September: None
October: Hallway navigation contest
November: Checker moving contest
(see below)
December: the annual talent contest
Martin Mason said that his students at San Antonio college were looking for a new contest which they would hold in conjunction with our club. While several ideas were being considered, we decided on a contest for 20 cm. Square robots operating on a 6x4 foot playing field with end zones. Each robot will be responsible for finding either red or black checkers in the center of the field and moving them to its own end zone. Martin will publish the final rules.
Contest
A Robosumo contest was held. Find out more about that event here.
Show and Tell
Several people gave presentations on their robot which had just competed.
Jim Ubersetzig told us about his new version of a robot hand which he is working on. It will have 4 fingers and a thumb with 2 (or more) axes of motion. He is looking into using a light beam emitted from the thumb and sensed at the fingertips to determine the position of objects within the hands potential grasp.
Ron Rose showed us (what appear to be, I missed it) a soldering vise kit which is available for just $1.99 at Harbor Freight.
.
He also extolled the virtues of Shoe Goo as an all purpose molding compound and adhesive
Don Fears showed us his new club Greeting bot (stationed outside the elevator to direct people to our room). Note: the bot is much more modestly dressed when on duty! He found it on sale after Halloween. It is quite animated and has 5 different programs which can be selected. This skeleton came originally from www.gemmy.com (who earlier inflicted Billy Bass on us).
Mike Shanahan gave us an update on his deep diving submarine. He has been having difficulties trying to ballast it such that it will float after a failure. He has been using syntactic foam which is not supposed to absorb water…but seems to do so at high pressures.
Ben (our VP) Showed us a hovercraft he is modifying. It has two fans, one to provide levitation and a second to give propulsion. He has it set up (sensors and programming) to act as a sumo fighter. But, unfortunately, it has no pushing power. For your amusement, his T shirt is from Mt. San Antonio college and says “ PHYSICS, we do it the lab what would be a felony to do in your garage”.
Tom Messerschmidt (sorry no picture) is interfacing an AIML chatbot into his Leaf Robot. He is working now to figure out how to make the chatbot voice recognition work with the Leaf built-in speech recognition. He had just reinstalled the software onto a laptop to bring to the meeting and had some trouble making it work as well as it was working at home on his desktop (Yeah, we’ve all heard that one ;-). He reported later that after making some changes to the laptop (including voice training) it was working much more reliably.