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Home/ Advanced Concepts Team/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by Guido de Croon

Contents contributed and discussions participated by Guido de Croon

Guido de Croon

New theory allows drones to see distances with one eye - 2 views

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    Inspired by the work that was done at the ACT, I continued working on optical flow landing at TU Delft. Today Bio & Bio published my article on a new theory that allows drones to see distances with a single camera. It shows that drones approaching an object with an insect-inspired vision strategy become unstable at a specific distance from the object. Turning this weakness into a strength, drones can actually use the timely detection of that instability to estimate distance. The new theory will enable further miniaturization of autonomous drones and provides a new hypothesis on flying insect behavior. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fm7SMJp8EA4&feature=youtu.be Article: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-3190/11/1/016004
Guido de Croon

Will robots be smarter than humans by 2029? - 2 views

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    Nice discussion about the singularity. Made me think of drinking coffee with Luis... It raises some issues such as the necessity of embodiment, etc.
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    Embodiment has some obvious advantages. For example, in the vision domain many hard problems become easy when you have a body with which you can take actions (like looking at an object you don't immediately recognize from a different angle) - a point already made by researchers such as Aloimonos.and Ballard in the end 80s / beginning 90s. However, embodiment goes further than gathering information and "mental" recognition. In this respect, the evolutionary robotics work by for example Beer is interesting, where an agent discriminates between diamonds and circles by avoiding one and catching the other, without there being a clear "moment" in which the recognition takes place. "Recognition" is a behavioral property there, for which embodiment is obviously important. With embodiment the effort for recognizing an object behaviorally can be divided between the brain and the body, resulting in less computation for the brain. Also the article "Behavioural Categorisation: Behaviour makes up for bad vision" is interesting in this respect. In the field of embodied cognitive science, some say that recognition is constituted by the activation of sensorimotor correlations. I wonder to which extent this is true, and if it is valid for extremely simple creatures to more advanced ones, but it is an interesting idea nonetheless. This being said, if "embodiment" implies having a physical body, then I would argue that it is not a necessary requirement for intelligence. "Situatedness", being able to take (virtual or real) "actions" that influence the "inputs", may be.
Guido de Croon

Robot termites able to build various structures - 0 views

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    Nice application of swarm robotics for building various structures. See the video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFwk303p0zY Their compilation process of a desired structure into local behavior rules seems of most interest.
Guido de Croon

Robot dragonfly DelFly Explorer avoids obstacles by itself - 1 views

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    TU Delft researchers have developed the DelFly Explorer, the world's first Micro Air Vehicle with flapping wings that can avoid obstacles by itself. The uniqueness of this achievement lies in the DelFly Explorer's very low weight (20 grams, i.e. a few sheets of paper), and this opens up new possible applications for both smaller and larger MAVs.
Guido de Croon

Worlds smallest autopilot (yet) - 1 views

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    The most tiny autopilot in the world was introduced yesterday by the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands. Named Lisa/s, she comes in at the scales with just a mere 1.9 grams, the 2*2 cm board has everything that a multirotor needs. Among the sensors are a 3 axle gyroscope, compass, barometer and a gps module.
Guido de Croon

special section Bioinspiration and biomimetics on "smart solutions from the plant kingdom" - 4 views

shared by Guido de Croon on 15 May 13 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
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    I wanted to post this one, as plant-inspired robotic design and algorithms are a new kid on the block, and then noticed that some ACT-members may already be aware of this special issue...
Guido de Croon

Robotic insects make first controlled flight - 3 views

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    The Robobee takes off without guide wires! It is still powered via a wire, and the control is done with the help of a VICON system and on an external computer, but this still is an amazing feat!
Guido de Croon

Astro Drone featured on robohub! - 4 views

shared by Guido de Croon on 28 Mar 13 - No Cached
LeopoldS and Joris _ liked it
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    "Robohub is an online platform that brings together leading communicators in robotics research, start-ups, business, and education from around the world." What is nice about robohub is that they generally give a look behind the scenes of interesting robotic studies.
Guido de Croon

Ambition - 0 views

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    Today we released the Astro Drone app. People that have the Parrot AR drone can freely download the game. While they fly their drone in the real world, they are trying to dock to the ISS in the virtual world. But the app is more than a game. Players can choose to participate in a scientific crowd sourcing experiment that aims to improve autonomous capabilities of space probes, such as landing, obstacle avoidance, and docking. If participating, the app extracts visually salient features from the images made by the drone's camera. The features are then combined with the estimates of the drone's state and uploaded. The data is then used in a research aiming to improve robot navigation.
Guido de Croon

Convolutional networks start to rule the world! - 2 views

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    Recently, many competitions in the computer vision domain have been won by huge convolutional networks. In the image net competition, the convolutional network approach halves the error from ~30% to ~15%! Key changes that make this happen: weight-sharing to reduce the search space, and training with a massive GPU approach. (See also the work at IDSIA: http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/vision.html) This should please Francisco :)
Guido de Croon

Bumblebees tackling the travelling salesman problem - 2 views

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    Nice article on how bumblebees optimize their path from flower to flower.
Guido de Croon

Can we automatically gauge the quality of a research paper just by means of visual appe... - 2 views

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    We discussed a few times about whether it is possible to determine the quality of a paper by extracting visual features from the paper and then learning a mapping to a measure of quality such as the number of citations etc. This paper circulated at CVPR 2010, and does exactly that, mapping visual features to estimate whether it has been accepted for the main conference or the workshops.
Guido de Croon

Autonomous 'RoBoat' Making World Record Attempt - 1 views

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    Autonomous sailing boat planned for setting a new record
Guido de Croon

Scientists Find Long-Sought Majorana Particle - Slashdot - 1 views

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    "... scientists at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands yesterday published their findings that they have indeed found the Majorana particle. The announcement on the university website provides both a summary of the ..." Also see: http://tudelft.nl/en/current/latest-news/article/detail/nanowetenschappers-vinden-langgezocht-majorana-deeltje/
Guido de Croon

sFFT: Sparse Fast Fourier Transform - 1 views

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    Much faster than the Fast Fourier Transform if the signal's frequency content is sparse, which is commonly the case for many real signals.
Guido de Croon

What happens when two artificial-intelligence bots talk to each other? - 7 views

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    Amazing conversation...
Guido de Croon

Daniel Wolpert on the real reason for the brain - 3 views

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    Great introduction to the Bayesian view on the workings of the brain, which has been a successful view in explaining many psychological phenomena, visual illusions, etc. One of the possible criticisms on this view is that it neatly separates perception and action.
Guido de Croon

Robotic Ostrich - 0 views

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    At the moment still in the phase of running in simulation, but who knows when the first robotic experiments will be.
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