Mar 14, 2009
These meeting minutes are also available in PDF format.
Class
1. Alex Brown presented a follow-up class on creating a mobile robot base.
2. Professor Martin Mason did a follow-up on the class he gave last month. presented a class on “Adding Speech to Your Robot: Speech Recognition”. He discussed phonemes He had his talking robot dog there to demonstrate. He discussed what we do with the text when we get it. He showed what happens without context sensitive recognition. The speech recognition did not work well. He demonstrated “blocking” and “non-blocking” recognition. Blocking limits the recognition to a pre-determined list of words to be recognized which increases accuracy. Non-blocking allows unlimited input but at a much lower accuracy. Several “listeners” may run simultaneously for different phrases and will then execute the phrase for that listener.
Business Meeting
• Treasurer’s report: $469. in the club account.
• Club web site is up and improved.
• Old business: Monetizing the web site with amazon, ebay, google, adsense, t-shirts, etc.
• Look for club sponsors for contests.
• Robin H. said about having a goal for the money to be used for.
• One member suggested that we post articles from members on the site.
• Motion for riverside robotics society to become official offshoot of club: Passed.
• Motion for family and friends event passed. Date to be determined.
Next Month
• March: Thomas Messerschmidt will be speaking on building robots with servos.
• May: Navigation using visual landmarks
Upcoming Competitions
• Apr: Line following competition: April 11 SMALL SCALE
• May: Line following competition: May LARGE SCALE ???
• June
• August: RoboMagellan
Show and Tell
Jose presented a skull and spine and is attempting to animate it.
Alex Brown presented more of his new Rocky II (Leaf) robot. Added a new board: Devantech SD84 Servo Controller which runs can run 84 servos.
Anouk Mangelschots demo’ed her solar powered walking crab robot made with a OWI robot kit.
• Robin Hewitt talked about creating a “keepon” robot (a small snowman-shaped robot).
She also talked about object recognition using a program that she wrote last week which located a beer label from a beer advertisement. (Not the “sift” feature matching.)
Professor Martin demo’ed a roving robot that uses IR sensors for object detection.
He then demo’ed it’s ability to determine objects in front of it and then map out a path to it’s goal.
Ron Rose presented a plan for using an IR receiver sensing three beacons in a room for navigation.
Jim pointed out that an article has been written about this in the June 1999 issue of the Robot Builder.
Emil Valkov again presented his further progress with tracking in 3D with RoboRealm with his three degree of freedom robotic arm and two computers. He used two computers, one for each camera. Emil also demonstrated a screw-rod robot arm.