Meeting Report
10:00 – 11:00 Leaf – ROS – Rosbridge , Dr. Bruce showed LISP code used to communicate between Windows and Linux ROS. The idea is to try to send/receive commands or data via a TCP/IP connection.
ROSBridge http://www.rosbridge.org/doku.php
http://www.rosbridge.org/doku.php?id=wiki:getting_started
A great and simple tutorial to learn LISP: http://lisp.plasticki.com/show?14F
11:00-12:00 Intro to Computer Vision by Alex, discussion on www.oborealm.com and opencv.org
- Book can be found at www.it-ebooks.info/read/3145
12:35 – 1:00 Business meeting:
- Walter talked about the successful participation on the RCX.com radio control expo at the OC Fairgrounds. Prof. Mason was the main organizer. Photos of the event were show.
- Walter talked about the movie HER, Amazon hiring people with knowledge of ROS for robotics positions.
- The club will have a book library. Books will be housed at CSULB in the meeting room. Walter will get a key to lock the books in one of the cabinets. A checkout method will have to be decided. We have about 10 books so far. We will contact Henry Arnold to see if he knows anything about our previous book collection.
Competitions:
July: walking robots – walk in a straight line for six feet using a bipedal robot. Fastest and most accurate robot to stay in the center at the end wins.
August: Turing Test – competition devised by Thomas
September: lifting - An idea submitted by Bob Huss: I just thought of an idea for a future contest: You know how ants can move an object 25 times their weight. How about we have a contest for moving an object relative to the weight of a robot. In other words we weigh a robot and an object and if robot lifts it, determine the winner by the best ratio, (like lifting one fourth it's weight). A second part of the contest could be bonus points for autonomously getting the heavier object and putting it in a square 2 feet away
October: find the blob contest – contest designed by Bill.
Class for July: 3D scanning demo and 3D printing by Walter Martinez
Show N Tell
1. Bob – Beamz/Occupy Mars Orchestra. Bob from http://www.kidstalkradiola.com demonstrated the latest Beamz http://thebeamz.com/ product that is used to accompany music with virtual instrucments and sound effects. Bob’s Occupy Mars Orchestra will perform three free concerts at the Long Beach VA hospital on June 24 at 6pm, July 31st at 6pm, August 28th at 6pm. Open to the public. See the KidsTalkRadioLA website for previous concert photos and info. Bob is looking for volunteers with knowledge of robotics, art, music to join the orchestra which will eventually become a musical.
2. Ron – Battery Status – new Harbor Freight multimeters have the ability to test amperage battery consumption. Ron explained on the board how to do this.
3. Walter – Jim Henson’s Creature Shop – check out the latest season of the SyFy TV show http://www.syfy.com/creatureshop and become inspired on how to create you next animatronics figures.
New Kickstater for a small six legged walking robot by XYZBot (Makers for Fritz animatronic head) http://www.xyzbot.com/TipToe/index.php
New walking robot from Robotis – Darwin Mini http://www.robotis.us/darwin-mini/ $500 – good for the walking robot competition next month ;-)
Based on the ARM Cortex M3 processor
http://www.trossenrobotics.com/open-cm-904b
4. Sergei – Pixy Camera (CMUCam5), Sergei created the pan/tilt from scratch. PixyMon allows you to track an object. It is very inexpensive at $69 http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Pixy%20Camera Works with Arduino with libraries and sample code included.
5. Sergei – has created a Robot Framework from scratch using C# Sergei demonstrated the ability of his new robot hardware and software platform to be manually driven via joystick, but its autonomous mode would kick in as soon as the robot was going to crash. The robot would stop automatically.
Link to Coursera supplemental material – the course is “Control of Mobile Robots”
http://pysimiam.sourceforge.net/coursera.html
It is a good outline of the course and a good refresher.
The intended use is to complete course tasks by writing missing code (which may be hard to do without listening to the lectures; you can download last week’s code to have most answers though).
You don’t need any hardware – simulator is provided. Programming in Python 2.7. It is possible to set up everything on Windows using Python 64-bit, but it is much less trouble with the 32-bit distribution.
You can connect it to actual hardware robot, if you choose to – all your programming will still apply.
Books to consider:
http://www.amazon.com/Robot-Programming-Practical-Behavior-Based-Robotics/dp/0071427783 - this is pretty basic and practical
http://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Robotics-Intelligent-Autonomous-Agents/dp/0262201623 – some of the theory behind Google cars
RCX.COM 2014 at the Orange County Fairgrounds in California
