I am using a Canon SD430 digital camera for a project.
This is a decent 5MP camera with the ability to transfer images or do remote control image capture (or previewing) via 802.11b wireless (WiFi). It is normally expensive, but Amazon is having a clearance sale and selling the camera for $159.
The link is here [www.amazon.com] but I don't know how long it will stay available.
[Update subsequent to the original post: this price only lasted a short time and the camera is now more expensive again.]
As a web-cam this is great! It provides much better quality data than a standard web cam, and also can be connected to any wireless connection you might have. The camera works with connections in either Ad Hoc or Infrastructure mode (i.e. either and access point or a laptop directly). You do need a wired connection to MacOS or WIndows to configure it, though (too bad you can't associate to any access point without that, so you could send photos while wardriving).
2007
2007
The Robotics Science and Systems Conference for 2007 just took place in Atlanta. This was the third RSS and consolidates its position as a primary consistent venue for robotics research. The 3-day meeting, as usual, features a number of 1-hour presentations from well-known invited speakers combined with 30-minutes talks on submitted papers chosen via a very selective and extensive review process.
Due to multiple cancelled flights I missed the beginning of the conference, but heard several very good presentations. There was a bias towards papers with a computational or algorithmic flavor, which is a trends in the robotics research community as a while, but one which the RSS organizers hope to minimize in favor or broad coverage of all the relevant research areas.
Ken Goldberg gave a great banquet speech on his work with technologically-inspired art. This took place at the Atlanta aquarium, which has some spectacular displays. As part of his presentation he briefly played some musical renditions of seismic recordings, and the beluga whales in one of the tanks really responded!
Noah Cowan gave an "early career" presentation on work he has done (partly with Bob Full) on building control-theoretic models of simple organisims like cockroaches and electric knifefish. This is great work and both relevant and refreshing for much of the audience.
At an evening organizing meeting it was confirmed that the next RSS will be at ETHZ in Switzerland at around the same time of year (which we hope will be the date to be used every year for RSS).
2007
The next pool trial of the Aqua robot family is schedule for tomorrow. We will be using the huge McGill University pool to run serval kinds of experiments.
We will be doing tests with both Aqua 1.0 and well as the newer model called Ramius. Ramius has a problem with the motor controllors for one of the legs, probably a defective SA60, but we should be OK despite that especially since it will be used mainly for testing vision systems.
Olivia will be doing a whole slow of tests with her model-based controllers. These will use Aqua 1.0.
Mike Jenkin and some of the people from York University will be here also. In addition to doing planning and helping with the experiments, they will be getting ready to take one of the Aqua-family robots back to York permanently. This model is known as Kroy, but it's not quite finished yet.
Anqui and Junaed will be testing vision based gesture control, tracking and servo control, and some neat not-yet-disclosed ideas.
2007
CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, has a feature on consumer robots on their on-line edition today. It includes articles discussing the destiny and state of consumer robotics, as well as the need for investment in robotics research and the robotics industry to stay in competition.
It also has a nice bit on robot lore (i.e. notable robots from
fiction) as well as a popular robotics quiz. There photo gallery on robots from "fiction to fact" is a bit of a disappointment though: is has a lot of standard fictional movie robots, but misses several of the more exotic yet interesting ones (for example the robots in the movie "Silent Running" or Gort). It also has very limited coverage of real robots, missing all interesting research robots and all interesting industrial and military robots, which is quite a set of omissions.
Employee quizzing the crowd
I stopped in at Chapter's Bookstore in Montreal to drop of our kids just before the release of the new Harry Potter book 7. Even though it was a couple of hours before the book became available, the crowd was large and very enthusiastic. I had hoped to buy a (different) book for myself by it was too difficult to negociate the store.
It was a really great atmosphere, but expectant and positive. Really great.
Followup note: we had ordered our copy from Chapter's by internet using the special Saturday delivery provided for this event by Canada Post. The book arrived at 10:45am Saturday morning and was greeted with even more enthusiasm than I expected.
2007
The pool trials with simultaneous use of two underwater robots went pretty smoothly, despite major last-minute roadblocks.
The night before the pool trial we discovered that a custom-made video-to-fiber-optic transducer board was not working. Chris tracked it down to a bad integrated circuit. He managed to desolder the surface-mount and order a replacement from digikey who expressed it to use the next day. It was soldered back in place in tiem for the pool trial.
Then, just a few hours before the pool trial we found a problem with one of the IMU's. This was tracked to a bad solder joint, which may be been undetected since a leak many months ago. That got fixed too and we made it to the pool trial just a little bit late.
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There's more. Read the whole story on "Multi-robot pool trial successful"
2007
A very surprising meta-analysis was reported in the journal Nature. Apparently a group at Bristol University and Cardiff University, UK found that cannabis use was linked to much higher incidence of psychotic illness in later life. Apparently even the most minimal marijuana use increases the chance of psychosis by 41%. This is a meta-analysis that combines the results from 35 other studies, and which controls for intelligence, substance abuse of other kinds, and other factors. The result is particularly surprising since it is very much at odds with previous work, including a landmark study in the Lancet several years ago, but it looks at more extensive and perhaps more subtle data.
This does not show that there is necessarily a cause-and-effect relationship, just that there is a statistical connection. An established psychologist (my mother) suggested to me that the explanation is that people who are tending towards crazy will try just about anything, while those are are not cannot be predicted, which pretty much explains this correlation. [She really is a professor emeritus of psychology at the Universite de Montreal.]
I should note it has no personal bearing on any lifestyle choice I need to consider for myself; I am mentioning it only because of its broad significance.
References:
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070723/full/070723-11.html [Nature.com]
The Lancet podcast on this work at http://podcast.thelancet.com/audio/lancet/2007/9584_28july.mp3 [ thelancet.com]
2007
The is a python COREblog "hook" method to allow me to be notified when comments are addded to the blog. This posting is only relevant to COREBlog users.
The following script sends me email when a comment is added.
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There's more. Read the whole story on "COREblog comment hook for anti-spam moderation"
