In the last Canadian federal budget, an additional $110 million dollars was allocated to the Canadian Space Agency specifically for Robotics (early 2009). This is leading edge of the expanded role for robotics in many sectors. A lot (all?) of this money will directly go via the Canadian Space Agency to Canadian High-Tech companies that develop advanced technologies. This money should be important, but in the long term is will get diffused quickly as it gets deployed in several kind of projects. In short, it will be a great stimulus to space robotics and to robotics in general, but it won't be so noticeable to the general public, or even the academic research community other than those tuned in to the industrial sector.
In the longer term, the Canadian Space Agency has been discussing their agenda for space exploration more generally. I was at a Space Exploration Workshop taking place at the Canadian Space Agency, where they have been presenting current and future work on systems and subsystems for Lunar exploration, Mars exploration and the eventual exploration of the Asteroids. In particular, Canada will probably be developing prototypes three different lunar exploration vehicle. These vehicles will be electric and we can reasonably expect lots of back and forth tech transfer with terrestrial vehicles. The plans also call for them to develop and deploy prototypes in realistic terrestrial scenarios. Platform contractors will develop platforms, but also integrate other subsystems onto them.
The Canadian lunar vehicles won't be pressurized (so an astronaut would have to wear a full suit when on board), but will be the ability to carry as pressurized capsule that will be build by another international partner.
With luck, the CSA will find funding to keep these exciting plans going.
2009
2009
Krys and I just got back from the screening of the This American Life live-to-tape movie cum radio show. This is a filmed representation of a live event that took place a few days ago, and which was broadcast live to a range of movie theaters all over the USA. The radio show (also available as a podcast) in a gem, but it is hard to accurately classify in a few words. My best shot is to call it a weekly collection of touching stories that range from amusing to bittersweet, and which often have an ironic or literary feel.
The Montreal event too place in a cineplex, and one with fairly large screens. The place wasn't sold out, but it was probably over 50% full, which is way more people than were there for any other Sunday-afternoon screening. Amazingly, in the two minutes it took to find a seat Krys spotted two other people we know, suggesting the crowd was biased, somehow, towards whatever circles we move in. There wasn't much live clapping at the end, but there was
... ...
There's more. Read the whole story on "This American Life in Montreal"
2009
I recently installed and used a miniature Sanav MK-7 GPS logger from SparkFun. This device is really small: a little smaller than one AA battery. I wanted to use it with Apple's OS X Leopard operating system: here's how.
The MK-7 is built around the MTK datalogger chipset and the Transystem EB-230 GPS engine, and includes Flash memory for storing GPS logs. It is connected to a computer with a USB-like cable to either charge the embedded battery, or to upload a data log. Like several other embedded devices there days, the Sanav actually uses a TTL-level serial (RS232) protocol, and needs a GPS-to-serial converter. This is embedded in the cable so that although the whole the cable looks like USB-to-mini-USB, it's actually got a chip inside it that converts USB signals to RS232, put uses a mini-USB connector on the logger to achieve the RS232 and power connection.
The means that to communicate with the device, you need to have the correct USB drivers. The cable I got with my device uses the Prolific Technology Inc. PL-2303 USB-to-serial bridge chip (0x067b), and the drivers for just about any operating system including OSX can be found here:
http://www.prolific.com.tw/eng/downloads.asp?ID=31.
Once the driver is installed, connecting to the serial port lets you see the live data logging (use a baud rate of 115200):
screen /dev/tty.usbserial 115200
My MK-7 seems to run a firmwre suite called M-core_2.02.
To extract logs, one option is to use the Java-based software package BT747 available from: http://bt747.free.fr. Be sure to load the version that includes "RxTx" libraries. You can also find it at the Sourceforge link http://bt747.wiki.sourceforge.net/mac_installation
2009
The 2009 International Conference on Robotics and Automation just finished in Kobe, Japan. Notable in addition to the technical content of the conference were the measures being taken regarding swine flu.
Among the hundreds to papers that were presented there were a couple that discussed recent developments regarding automated flight be quad-rotor helicopters. Wolfram Burgard's group won the best paper prize for work on doing automated mapping and localization (SLAM) with such a helicopter. Our friend and former McGill student Nick Roy also won the early career award for his achievements, which include work on such helicopters (mentioned on this blog a few weeks ago).
Junaed gave a presentation of our work using "spatio-chromatic" trackers to follow human dives with our underwater robot. This work uses a very large set of possible image filters with both spatial and color tunings to detect the person. The combination of filters to use is practice is optimized using the Adaboost machine learning algorithm.
Philippe gave a talk on our work using simple contact dynamics to measure the surface texture of the ground the robot is walking on, and classify and identify it using unsupervised learning.
Yiannis presented work with Dave and Dimitri on using a combination of Extended Kalman Filters and Monte Carlo Markov Chain methods for state estimation. The work is applied to computing node positions for a sensor network. In that work, the hybrid MCMC/EKF combines advantages of each individual algorithm.
