UAV outback challenge where an unmanned ariel vehicle needs to find a person and drop supplies off to them. Registrations are due on the 27th September!
NASA Sample Return Centennial Challenge, a 1.5 million dollar prize competition to have robots autonomously explore a region, collect samples, and bring them back to base. Registration due in January, with the competition set for June. Only 8 months before the deadline when they announced the competition details - what are they thinking?
The ICRA solutions in perception challenge (May 2012), this doesn't seem too difficult - Identify and classify a set of objects, where you are given some training data/time. Use any sensor(s) you like.
Australian CiSRA ExtremeImaging competition an interesting computer-photography competition, due October this year, finals in November.
I rarely have enough spare time these days to be able to play a game, let alone identify a block of time large enough to dedicate to a game like Civilization 5 - which can take up to 12 hours to play a fast game. So I decided to create a mod for Civ 5 that would significantly speed up gameplay and enable a game to be completed in a few hours.
Modding the game isn't directly supported under OSX, however it can be done.
Comment the following line: (add a '--' to the start)
Controls.ModsButton:SetHide( true );
Copy a mod you have downloaded into the:
~/Documents/Aspyr/Sid Meier's Civilization 5/MODS
directory.
You will need to unzip/extract them before they will work.
If it is a civ5mod file, simply rename it to .7z, and you can use StuffitExpander or any similar tool to extract the folder.
Start Civ5, and you should see a 'MOD' option on the menu.
You can download my simple casual gaming mod for Civilization 5 here. It replaces the standard 'quick' game. At the beginning of the game, you will find most things only take one turn to complete. Things will start to settle down quickly though in classical times.
It was an interesting event, showcasing the best of Australian science. Stiff competition meant the first place in the Defence category was snatched away by Prof Abdesselam Bouzerdoum who has done fantastic work in novel sensing systems.
I visited the Asia-Pacific International Mining Exhibition (AIMEX), held every four years. There was a lot of interesting technology on display, with a strong presence of simulators, drills and long-wall gear. Being mining, a lot of very large machines were on display, and the exhibition hall was huge. Automation also had a small presence.
Atlas-Copco had a set of their autonomous drill rig simulators on display, and I managed to get a chance to go through the process. Drilling is a non-trivial task, and it takes at least two weeks for an operator to familiarize themselves with the process. The autonomous drill system certainly makes it easier to operate the equipment, but the drill holes still have to be lined up manually - arguably the most challenging task.
Atlas Copco Autonomous Drill console
Eickhoff had a demonstration of their automated long-wall system, that uses the Indurad radar system.
CAT were displaying some of their new autonomous equipment, soon to be installed in Western Australia at FMG's Solomon mine. CAT is always a slow mover to adopt technology but it is interesting to see how fast this technology is being adopted by the major Australian miners, now including Rio Tinto, BHP, Newcrest and FMG.
Eickhoff longwall automation
Below is a video of the CAT system I captured at AIMEX. Apparently this system actually does realtime path planning and adjustment as opposed to following a pre-programmed path like other (Sandvik) systems.
You can watch some more videos of autonomous mine vehicles on youtube:
With the help of Chris Mylrae (music) I put together a last minute entry to the Mozilla Demoparty demo competition. You can see our entry The Self Explanatory Demo. It derives and explains a number of oldschool demoscene effects, including the XOR bitplasma, sin/cos plasma, ripples, inteference, and tunnel effect. It also shows the origin of equations for radius of a circle, sine and cosine, tan and arctan, and 3d projection. In essence, it is an animated version of the demo effect explanations on this blog.
To put together my entry in the two days I had I used, three.js.
There is now a new tutorial site for three.js, it is definitely worth taking a look at.
Finally, I'll leave you with an amazing 64k production, 'uncovering static' by Fairlight and Alcatraz.
The Kinect is a revolutionary sensor for robotics - the low price point has seen an explosion of interest and applications in this field. (Hopefully we will see the same for the Neato XV11 low cost laser scanner one day). I was very impressed by the data the Kinect returned, it is a fantastic device.
sudo port install git-core
sudo port install libtool
sudo port install libusb-devel
git clone https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect.git
cd libfreenect
mkdir build
cd build
ccmake ..
cmake ..
make
sudo make install
(Press 'g' to generate your cmake make files). Very simple.
Now check under system profiler to see that the Kinect device is detected.
I had the following error when I tried to read from the device:
Isochronous transfer error: 1
Thankfully, this was easy to solve with a fully self-contained installer from AS3 kinect OSX download package. You should now be able to read the color image, depth map, and command the servo.
The next step will likely be to interpret the data in some form. The Point Cloud Library will be very useful for processing the data. A tutorial on Point Cloud Library is available, although many features are breezed over.
But to begin with PCL, you will need Eigen, a fast vector and matrix math library. (Also used in MRPT)
First download Eigen, and unzip it. Building Eigen is quite straight forward:
cd eigen-eigen-3.0.1
mkdir build
cd build/
cmake ../
sudo make install
PCL has a self installing package, and will install itself to /usr/local/lib/libpcl_*
Here is a simple test program from the tutorial:
#include
#include "pcl/io/pcd_io.h"
#include "pcl/point_types.h"
int main (int argc, char** argv) {
pcl::PointCloud cloud;
//Fill the cloud data
cloud.width = 5;
cloud.height = 1;
cloud.is_dense = false;
cloud.points.resize(cloud.width * cloud.height);
for (size_t i = 0; i < cloud.points.size(); ++i) {
Not so long ago there were a number of robotics packages that provided a variety of functionality of various tasks, such as OpenCV for computer vision, MRPT for mobile robots and ORCOS for general functions. Recently, this has changed as Robot Operating System (ROS) has become the predominant system which has swallowed the functionality of all the other packages.
ROS functionality includes:
Support for various sensors and robots including Neato XV-11, Roomba, IRobot, Pioneer/ARIA, Nao, Android, KUKA, Sick, Hokuyo, Bumblebee, Firewire cameras, Webcameras, Xsens, Wiimote, EtherCAT, CAN
Support for a number of other libraries/packages including CUDA, OpenCV, Eigen, PCL, SVM/Bayesian, Spatial subdivision, OGRE, XML, and many more.
Refer to this full list of ROS packages. The functionality encapsulated by ROS is both amazing and disturbing.
I've never been a fan of massive (disorganised!) frameworks that force a work structure onto you, but the robotics world isn't leaving you with much choice anymore. After implementing a graph based information flow architecture in ImprovCV and working closely with DirectShow's graphfilter I'm also keenly aware of the limitations of a graph-based approach to software development. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution, unfortunately ROS leaves little choice.
Thankfully some ROS packages are largely stand alone, so there is still some hope that one day some organisation will put in the effort to streamline and clean up ROS overall.
In any case getting ROS running on Apple Mac OSX 10.6 was not too difficult, however I lost my install notes in an untimely crash, so I'll only give a brief overview. ROS installation relies on MacPorts. I'd been holding off on installing MacPorts as it has historically been unstable, and doesn't play nicely with already installed libraries. MacPorts is now stable and well tested, but it still doesn't play nice with the rest of your system.
To install ROS I followed the ROS diamondback OSX installation instructions, all without any major dramas. I did have to alter the CMakeLists.txt as suggested in the troubleshooting section.
MacPorts gave me a few headaches, some of the errors I encountered were:
Error: Target org.macports.install returned: no destroot found
To solve, use:
sudo port clean NAME
Error: NAME already exists and does not belong to a registered port
To solve, use:
sudo port -f activate NAME
Once ROS is all installed you can source setup.sh. Remember to add in any additional packages to ROS_PACKAGE_PATH.
All in all, I wouldn't recommend running ROS on OSX, although the base ROS install works without any major dramas, installing each individual package is a bit of a struggle.
I believe ROS is an appropriate name, it really should be a stand alone operating system. I would strongly advise setting up a separate linux OS dedicated to your ROS install, running ROS ontop of OSX is quite problematic.
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