One of the disadvantages of underwater (or amphibious) robotics is that there is a lot of logistic overhead to do real experiments. Just doing a smallish test in the pool requires not only that the whole pool be reserved (which is hard to accomplish), but that a fair bit of equipment as be transported and installed poolside.
In practice, this usually involves a team of 6 to 8 people, including swimmers (or divers) who accompany the robot and take photos underwater. Since we rarely get more than a couple of straight hours of pool time, this means we needs to minimize setup and take down times. When the robot is tethered, just managing the delicate fibre-optic cable is a hassle, and spooling it up wastes valuable time. Using a more robust cable would mean a heavier cable that would interfere with the robot's behavior and the measurements of its dynamics.
In the last year or so we have been doing lots more experiments without any tether. This has been a big win, and setup time (and logistic support) is now pretty limited. That's great, but it a small way I miss the bug party atmosphere of a big crew.
2008
2008
Last week I was at the International Conference on Robots and Systems (IROS 2008) in Nice, France. This is one the the two huge annual conferences on robotics research. This one places particular emphasis on complete systems and it has an especially large representation from Japan and Asia, being sponsored by the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ) as well as the IEEE.
As I get older, I end up spending a larger fraction of my conference attendance time having discussions in the hallways and making plans, instead of merely attending the technical sessions. Despite that, I heard a variety of talks spanning both areas I work in like SLAM and underwater robotics, as well as topics like the Design of Humanoid Robots that I only track via conference presentations.
One of our own presentations was an overview of the Aqua robot project, and how we are moving to increasing levels of autonomy with the underwater vehicle. The presentation was tricky since rather than focus on a single narrow technical problem, it had to weave together a group of projects and problems that, together, allow the vehicle to operate semi-autonomously. In the same conference session on underwater robotics we also heard about a few types of autonomous surface vehicle and how they can navigate autonomously.
Dave Meger presented work he had done with Yiannis and myself as part of his Master's thesis. That dealt with using a mobile robot to help the nodes of a sensor network to estimate their own positions. In particular, as the robot explores the metric embedding of the network, and can select various path planning strategies, and these directly impact the accuracy of the localization process.
The Large Hadron Collider is scheduled to have it's first actual particle collisions soon, as opposed to just being "warmed up".
[ I wrote this article a while back, and had it cached until collision time. I didn't expect, and the time, that the LHC would get so much coverage. ]
From the LHC web site:
There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions, but what's for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator, as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe.
There are some people who believe that is a particle accelerator that will be able to create small black holes. This would be truly microscopic and not the same as Einstein black holes (they would be much smaller than a neutron).
These black holes should evaporate quickly and be no threat, although there is a minority of people who fear it could destroy the world if the black holes persist. The seems unlikely since cosmic rays have as much energy as the LHC beams, and they haven't destroyed the earth yet. On the other hand, cosmic rays have very high velocities while the LHC could produce occasional low velocity black holes. Thus, this does not appear to be a very credible threat. More importantly, there are other cosmological arguments to suggest such non-evaporating black holes cannot exist. On the other other hand, it should be a good excuse for an end-of-the-world party. There's another end-of-the world mechanism as well, based on strangelets made of special quark matter, but it too seems to be ruled out and I don't have the stamina to explain it.
With respect to data processing, the LHC is supposed to produce 15 petabytes of data per year (i.e. (15 thousand terabytes -- 15,000 trillion). The entire Google index of the web, in comparison, has processed one trillion links as of mid 2008 and index a far smaller number (according to the Google blog).
Live picture. CMS construction at Point 5. Click to enlarge and refresh.
2008
Every times I see it, I like it more.
In The Know: Are We Giving The Robots That Run Our Society Too Much Power?
2008
One of the main things that makes me love the iPhone is the combination of a good solid web browser with the phone functions. I once had a Treo and there is no comparison at all. Sometimes people complain about the browsing speed, so it was interesting to see the side-by-side comparison below between the Apple iPhone and the RIM Blackberry Bold.
The video makes and interesting and compelling demonstration, but the upshot is that the iPhone is a lot faster. I wonder if this is partly because the iPhone is based on a robust UNIX-like kernel which is the backbone of the internet, as well as because the Safari-based browser has been the subject of development for the huge Mac community for many years. (Claims regarding the speed of Safari version 3 in comparison to other browsers have been around for some time.)
2008
Today was my second day in my new role of Director of the McGill School of Computer Science (roughly equivalent to "Chairman of the Department"). The school is part of the Faculty of Science, but it has many links to Engineering as well. I also have some plans to increase the visibility of robotics at McGill, and this platform should help.
2008
On November 14th, 2008, Michael Geist will give two talks in Montreal. One will be at the Computer Science colloquium at the Cchool of Computer Science of McGill Univeristy, and the abstract is below. The other talk will be at the Trudeau Foundation. The McGill talk is open to the public; I don't know much about the other talk.
Why Copyright? The Fight for Canada's Digital Future"
Abstract:
In June 2008, the Canadian government introduced Bill C-61, new
copyright legislation that closely followed the U.S. Digital
Millennium Copyright Act. The public response to the bill was both
immediate and angry - tens of thousands of Canadians wrote to the
Minister and their local Members of Parliament, leading to town hall
meetings, negative press coverage, and the growing realization that
copyright was fast becoming a mainstream political and policy issue.
The "Canadian copy-fight", which includes many new advocacy groups and
the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group that has over 90,000
members, has attracted considerable attention from the mainstream
media, with many wondering how copyright had emerged as a contentious
policy issue. This talk will assess both the legislative proposals and
the Canadian copyfight experience in an effort to answer the oft-asked
question – "why copyright?".
2008
In the new International Edition of Hasbro's game Monopoly (known as "Monopoly Here and Now: World Edition"), the Atlantic City street names that defined the game have been replaced by the names of major international cities. Of course, in classic Monopoly the square named Boardwalk was the most expensive, important and glamorous on the board and the ownership of Boardwalk often determined the outcome of the game.
In Monopoly Here and Now, the square that was Boardwalk will be called Montreal! The game will also have revised events with an international theme replacing the traditional "Community Chest" and "Chance" cards. The city that occupies the lowest-priced square is the Polish city of Gdynia, an industrial port town of about a quarter-million people. ''
One of our friends, incidentally, works for Hasbro and got to play the role of the iconic Mr. Monopoly (formerly known as Rich Uncle Pennybags) at the product announcement yesterday.
To fool with the consistency of placement of Montreal, I tried comparing hotel prices for Montreal and Gdynia. On the travel web site that I use (tripadvisor.com), Montreal has 85 hotels listed and reviewed, with nightly prices from $592 to $39 (median price 315). (The $39 price is in student residence at McGill University, available only while students are away in the summer.) In contrast, the 17 hotels listed for Gdynia vary in price from $190 to $24 with a median price or $107. Likewise, using Expedia.com, the median prices for Montreal and Gdynia are $340 and $131 respectively. (The cheapest hotel shown in Gdynia is the Kropeczka Hotel which is 17 Euros and actually looks pretty nice.)
For Paris, France, however, I get a median single-night hotel price of $678 due to an very expensive outlier hotel, so I guess the median hotel price wasn't the basis for Montreal's placement in the top spot. In must have been the quality of the robotics labs!
The full list
... ...
There's more. Read the whole story on "Montreal is Boardwalk in the new Monopoly"
2008
This Summer I attended the International Symposium on Experimental Robotics. This meeting takes place every second year and tends to be located in diverse locations. This year it was in Athens, Greece and Natasha came along to check it out and do some sightseeing.
As the name implies, the conference features papers that have an experimental component. The selection on topics was very diverse ranging from medical robotics and (endoscopy -- cameras on a flexible stick) to search and rescue. There were a couple of papers on very different kinds dealing with autonomous or semi-autonomous flying helicopters. A student from Andrew Ng's lab discussed their ongoing work on the control of helicopters, and the amazing dynamics they can manage. Somebody from Nick Roy's lab presented the vision-based helicopter system they have developed that recently won a search-and-rescue contest (as noted previously in this blog in entry 112).
My own presentation dealt with the Aqua underwater vehicle and I talked about some new ways we are doing visual servo control to interact with human divers. In particular, I talked about some early results on using machine learning to assist the construction of servo controllers for real-time tracking underwater where color is an important cue.
As usual, the conference presented a great opportunity to meet people from the community and talk about research. Unlike larger meetings, the group is fairly focussed and you end up spending plenty of time with the same (very interesting) group. For example, I got to speak at length with a couple of interesting younger researchers such as Katie Byl and Jonathan Clark, and may end up with a new research sub-project as a result. Of course, it was also great to meet many old friends and colleagues, not the least of whom was the eminent Oussama Khatib who is the lead organizer of the meeting. Natasha got to briefly monopolize the dance floor with Oussama at the end-of-conference dinner; he also turns out to be a great dancer.
A highlight of the trip, aside from the talks, was a concert one evening. This was a performance by the Bolshoi Orchestra that was help in the Acropolis . They performed “Alexander Nevsky", a cantata for mezzo-soprano chorus and orchestra, opus 78 (1939) Sergei Prokofiev and Vladimir Lugovskoy. It also included Violin Concert No. 2, with Simos Papanas (of Thessaloniki) as the soloist and was conducted by the chief conductor of the Bolshoi: Alexander Vedernikov. This was the best possible venue to a concert and made the trip truly memorable.
2008
Today I visited Wolfram Burgard's lab in Freiburg Germany. There are numerous interesting projects going on there, including work on range estimation from video and range data, and modeling of robot kinematics using Gaussian processes (the latter was the subject of a recent paper at RSS). They also have several interesting implementation projects running, including an automated blimp, and automated helicopter, and several types of vehicles.
I also gave a talk there whose primary focus was our own underwater and amphibious robotics work at McGill. Unfortunately, the display system would not recognize my older Powerbook, and as a result the 1-hour talk started a half -hour late. This was a new experience for me. This got me totally stressed out and led to a very uncomfortable talk for me. That said, the visit was very pleasant, interesting and enriching.
2008
I am going to the Robotics Science and Systems Conference and want to load my Garmin GPS with a map of Europe. The open source gpsbabel program seems suitable, but the macports install (port install gpsbabel) fails with an error as follows:
configure.in:39: error: AC_SUBST: `' is not a valid shell variable name
The solution for me was to visit the source directory on my machine:
cd /opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_textproc_gpsbabel/work/gpsbabel-1.3.5
and edit the file config.in
to delete the lines mentioning the (obsolete) AC_EXEEXT. Then it installed fine.
Once a suitable map has been created, the Garmin 60CSX, like other Garmin USB devices, can be directly mounted on the desktop as a mass storage device. This requires you to go into the System setup menu, in the interface section, and click on "Mass Storage Device".
It's also possible to export a set of points of interest from Google Earth as a .kml file, and then use gpsbabel to convert this to a .gpx file (which can presumably be uploaded directly using gpsbabel).
