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In a recent video, Willow Garage researcher Eitan Marder-Eppstein describes the open-source navigation stack they've released as version 1.0. The code, available at http://ros.org/wiki/navigation, was designed to be flexible and cross-platform, he says, and could be used in anything from a small iRobot Create-based bot to a large multi-sensor robot like Willow's own PR2 (which Spectrum has covered in detail here and here).

We are entering the robotic age. All over the world, we see research projects and companies working on realistic, market driven robots, with impressive realizations ranging from intelligent vacuum cleaners to humanoid robots.   This is a very exciting time and some people see in the current situation many common points with the early days of the computer industry. However, like PCs in the early 80's, today's robots are still incompatible in term of software. There is yet no standard way to reuse one component from one robot to the other, which is needed to have a real software industry bootstraping. And most attempts have been failing to provide tools genuinely adapted to the complex need of robot programming.   Here at Gostai, we believe that the industry needs a powerful robotics software platform, ready to face the challenges of Artificial Intelligence and autonomous robots programming.

If you're a long time reader, you may remember our mention in 2008 of Emanuel Diamant's provocatively titled paper "I'm sorry to say, but your understanding of image processing fundamentals is absolutely wrong" (PDF). Diamant is back with a presentation created for the 3rd Israeli Conference on Robotics, with the equally provocative title: "It's Cognitive Robotics, Stupid" (PDF). In it he laments the lack of agreed upon definitions for words like intelligence, knowledge, and information that are crucial to the development of robotics.

With all of the new competition in the consumer robotics field, it’s about time for iRobot to show that they’re still capable of innovating new and exciting things. AVA, their technology demonstrator, definitely fits into the new and exciting category. AVA is short for ‘Avatar,’ although iRobot was careful not to call it a telepresence robot so as not to restrict perceptions of what it’s capable of. AVA is capable of fully autonomous navigation, relying on a Kinect-style depth sensing camera, laser rangefinders, inertial movement sensors, ultrasonic sensors, and (as a last resort) bump sensors. We got a run-down a few days ago at CES, check it out:

Back in 2008, IBM announced their plan to try and create a computer that more accurately imitated the computing process of the human brain. Now, with a little help from 4 research Universities and DARPA, they’ve produced prototypes of the first few chips and are on the way to building their first, full-fledged robo-brain. If you’re going to run for the hills, now would be a good time to start. The project’s goal is to drastically alter the way in which computers compute by changing their structure to mimic the human brain instead of functioning as calculators. You see, most computers are von Neumann machines, meaning that the memory and processor are separated. The practical result of this is that as you reach the limit of how fast information can be passed from the memory to the processor via the bus, you reach the limit of computing power. In the human brain, the memory and the processors are in thousands of nodes that communicate slower, but simultaneously and radially. IBM’s prototypes are chips that, in quantity, can emulate those nodes.

Back in 2008, IBM announced their plan to try and create a computer that more accurately imitated the computing process of the human brain. Now, with a little help from 4 research Universities and DARPA, they’ve produced prototypes of the first few chips and are on the way to building their first, full-fledged robo-brain. If you’re going to run for the hills, now would be a good time to start. The project’s goal is to drastically alter the way in which computers compute by changing their structure to mimic the human brain instead of functioning as calculators. You see, most computers are von Neumann machines, meaning that the memory and processor are separated. The practical result of this is that as you reach the limit of how fast information can be passed from the memory to the processor via the bus, you reach the limit of computing power. In the human brain, the memory and the processors are in thousands of nodes that communicate slower, but simultaneously and radially. IBM’s prototypes are chips that, in quantity, can emulate those nodes.

This video from PAL Robotics shows the teleoperation system of its REEM robot. Equipped with a Kinect sensor as a motion capture device, a laptop captures the gestures and movements of a person and feeds the result to the robot as commands. This process is called motion retargeting and the teleoperation system was developed by Marcus Liebhardt as part of his master thesis project. PAL Robotics is a small Spanish company based in Barcelona, part of the PAL Group from Abu Dhabi. It develops humanoid robots since 2004 and its latest version of the REEM line of robots focuses towards commercial applications.

Android Robotics Projects

Setting up a development environment ready for Android robotics code Learning how to program for the AVR microcontroller Connecting servos and sensors Home-brewing your own PCB design, and choosing PCB suppliers Mounting the phone as a robot brain and teaching the robot to obey touch commands Approaching and designing different robot architectures