Sep 11, 2010
32 attendees today.
Class
Professor Martin Mason taught the class at 11 am. Title = Machine Intelligence.
Prof Mason has recently returned from a one year sabatical from his teaching position at Mount San Antonio Colege. Sabatical location = Plymouth, England, where he conducted research and development on various types of robots. The class presentation is mostly about the research performed at that location.
Personal service robots should have:
- A large set of behavior primitives.
- Learn user profiles.
- Use the user profiles.
- Always do something physical and observable in response to a verbal request, even if it is the wrong response.
Tidying Task
The walking robot often fell down, so they changed to using three omni-wheels on the bottom of the robot. This was more reliable. The arena resembled a pool table: large, flat, smooth surface, barrier around the edges. They used Robo-Realm machine vision software and a ceiling-mounted video camera that looked down at the robot and various brightly colored objects. The robot's head was covered by a piece of cardboard that was printed with a distinctive pattern -- which Robo-Realm could identify and track.
With enough practice, humans speaking into a microphone could cause the robot to roll over and pick up a specified brightly-colored object and then place it in the verbally commanded location.
Hearing
When human speech was garbled, the software chose a frequently-used word when it sounded similar enough. The words that were heard were placed into slots in a frame similar to this:
Action Requested: (word)
Object: (word)
Object Description: (word)
Target: (word)
Etc
Vision
After Robo-Realm software parsed the image into colored blobs, they used the quad-tree image division algorithm to produce a tree structure of the image segments that contained colored blobs (or the robot).
Servos
They used AX-12 Robotis servos, which use the RS-485 bus, and have lots of torque.
Criteria Of Quality
- User acceptance.
- Interaction Occurred
- Did what human wanted
- Quality of self-selected goal.
Business Meeting
Next Classes
- October - Martin La Laroque (one of the robo-magellan builders) will teach us about his robo-magellan robot design, development, and construction.
- November - Ron Rose will teach us about the Propeller chip, made by Parallax.
- December Nothing planned.
Next Contests
- October Robo-Magellan Contest (outdoor robots)
- November Sumo Robot Contest
- December Talent Contest
Sumo Contest
We had quit a good turnout for our Robosumo contest. Read more about it here.
Show & Tell
Thomas Messersmidt and Tim Lewis presented their hacked Elvis Head. Tim had added some custom electronics and software which moved the eyeballs, eyelids, and mouth in a repeating pattern.
Ron Rose has purchased the Propeller (microcontroller chip containing 8 separate cpu's) development kit and talked about it, passed around the textbooks for it.
Martin Mason talked about somew gadgets he recently acquired, such as a low-battery warning beeper, a cool lithium battery pack, The logitech 5000 usb video camera has a rubber grommet around the lense, pry off the rubber ring to reveal the M12 lense thread that fits security camera lenses.
Tim Lewis demonstrated some circuit boards full of bright red, blue, and green, and white LED's. Some of these circuit boards require 24 volts DC.
Martin Mason demonstrated his use of the Beagle board (cost approx $150, uses approx 2 watts of electrical power, functions as a complete personal computer. Has connectors for video output, mouse, keyboar, USB, serial for debug port.