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Later this month, Carnegie Mellon's CMDragons small-size robotic soccer team will be competing again at RoboCup, to be held in Singapore. CMDragons has tended to find their edge in their software as opposed to their hardware. Their latest software advantage will be their new "physics-based planning", using physics to decide how to move and turn with the ball in order to maintain control. Previous control strategies simply planned where the robot should move to and shoot from, assuming a ball placed at the front center of the dribbler bar would stay there. The goal of Robocup is to create a humanoid robotic soccer team to compete against human players in 2050. Manuela Veloso, the professor who leads the Carnegie Mellon robotic soccer lab, "believe[s] that the physics-based planning algorithm is a particularly noteworthy accomplishment" that will take the effort one step closer to the collective goal.

In short, Joe argues, "Throughout, it became abundantly clear that TM, much like generics, was a systemic and platform-wide technology shift. It didn’t require type theory, but the road ahead sure wasn’t going to be easy." The whole blog post deals with how many implementation challenges platform-wide support for STM would be in .NET, including what options were considered. He does not mention Maurice Herlihy's SXM library approach, but refers to Tim Harris's work several times.

Erlang allows for massively scalable concurrency, often with millions of lightweight, thread-like components known as actors. Unfortunately, using Erlang requires rewriting all of your legacy code into a rather esoteric language. But there are other options, such as the little known CCR platform that was developed by .NET's robotics department. Actor based languages such as Erlang are able to achieve high degrees of parallelism by using the Actor model. Under this model the fundamental unit of concurrency is not a thread or fiber, but rather something much smaller. Known as a "process" in Erlang, each unit of concurrency has a base overhead of about 1200 bytes on a 32-bit system. By comparison, a thread on the Windows operating system defaults to 1 MB just for the stack, additional space is also needed for bookkeeping and thread local storage. Because they are so lightweight, an application can spawn literally millions of processes simultaneously.

In its latest episode, the Robots Podcast interviews the lead researcher of the Distributed Flight Array and one of my colleagues at the ETH Zurich's IDSC, Raymond Oung. The Distributed Flight Array (DFA) is an aerial modular robot. Each individual module has a single, large propellor and a set of omniwheels to move around. Since a single propellor does not allow stable flight, modules move around to connect to each other. As shown in this video of the DFA, the resulting random shape then takes flight. After a few minutes of hovering the structure breaks up and modules fall back to the ground, restarting the cycle. As most projects at the IDSC, the DFA is grounded in rigorous mathematics and design principles and combines multiple goals: It serves as a real-world testbed for research in distributed estimation and control, it abstracts many of the real-world issues of the next generation of distributed multi-agent systems, and it provides an illustration for otherwise abstract concepts like distributed sensing and control to a general public. For more information on current work, future plans and real-world applications, read on or tune in!

The latest episode of the Robots Podcast looks at the following scenario: Imagine being able to throw a hand-full of smart matter in a tank full of liquid and then pulling out a ready-to-use wrench once the matter has assembled. This is the vision of this episode's guests Michael Tolley and Jonas Neubert from the Computational Synthesis Laboratory run by Hod Lipson at Cornell University, NY. Tolley and Neubert give an introduction into Programmable Matter and then present their research on stochastic assembly of matter in fluid, including both simulation (see video above) and real-world implementation. Read on or tune in!

The latest episode of the Robots podcast interviews Dr. Alvar Saenz-Otero from MIT on the SPHERES project. SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites) are basketball-sized satellites able to fly in and maintain formation at nanometer precision. In the second part of this episode we continue our quest for a good definition of a robot by looking at a well-known definition dating back to 1979. Read on or tune in!

Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel. View the demos and sample applications to see a few of the visualizations that flare makes it easy to build. To begin making your own visualizations, download flare and work through the tutorial. You should also get familiar with the API documentation. Need more help? Visit the help forum (you'll need a SourceForge login to post). Flare is open-source software released under a BSD license, meaning it can be freely deployed and modified (and even sold for $$). Flare's design was adapted from its predecessor prefuse, a visualization toolkit for Java

Piotr Zalewa has created a really great playground, jsFiddle, for testing sample code and playing with the Web. With an area for the holy trinity of the Web (HTML, CSS, JS) and an output region, you can get right to hacking. It goes beyond this though. You can also add resources, an Ajax echo backend, and auto load from a slew of JavaScript frameworks. You can also check out the examples and see great stuff such as Processing in action. And the finishing touch, share and embed. Piotr wrote all of this using CodeMirror and MooTools. Nice! Having worked on Bespin, and developed a playground like this (looking forward to show a new mobile one soon!) I appreciate the work!

aims at developing swarms of flying robots that can be deployed in disaster areas to rapidly create communication networks for rescuers. Flying robots are interesting for such applications because they are fast, can easily overcome difficult terrain, and benefit from line-of-sight communication.

There's an interesting video on YouTube from Binary Millenium showing how to make a 3D model out of real objects using Microsoft's Photosynth. It's an interesting idea that, while unofficial, may be a big time saver and a lot of fun for many of you. This will work best if you use a Photosynth that not only has a high rate of 'synthiness' but also lots of points in the point cloud. A point in the point cloud means that a specific feature has been identified in two or more photos, allowing for Photosynth to determine to some degree where in space that point exists. While a good Photosynth might have 100% synthiness, meaning all the pictures are connected, it doesn't necessarily mean there will be lots of points in the point cloud.

The past week or so there have been two stories about very secure system protocols being able to be successfully hacked by researchers. The first concerned the report by the AP that Christopher Tarnovsky, a former U.S. Army computer-security specialist and who now runs the Flylogic security company, was able to crack open (literally) a Trusted Platform Module or TPM and obtain its cryptographic keys. This hadn't been done before, or at least admitted to publicly.

Margus Veanes, a Researcher from the RiSE group at Microsoft Research, gives an overview of Rex, a tool that generates matching string from .NET regular expressions. Rex turns regular expressions into symbolic automatons, then gives them to a constraint solver to find matching strings.

In this talk Microsoft Technical Fellow and C# Chief Architect Anders Hejlsberg gives an overview of the new features in C# 4.0, including dynamic typing, co- and contra-variance, named and optional parameters, and improved COM interoperability. Anders will also discuss some of the ideas that are envisioned for future versions of C#. This session is presented by Anders Hejlsberg during Microsoft DevDays 2010 in The Hague in The Netherlands.