GLXP Team Summit 2012 and UACh Presentation

From 28 to 31 of last May, there was the "Google X PRIZE Team Summit 2012" in Washington DC. The Team AngelicvM show on the event  the progress of the team on the different areas of the mission....

It takes a while but the video of the presentation is finally online!...Here is it:

When the event was ending, the GLXP guys give us the "Most Surprising Presentation" Award!, we was pretty happy!! :-)

On our arrive to Chile, the "Universidad Austral de Chile - Sede Puerto Montt" (Southes University of Chile - Campus Puerto Montt), home of the R.E.A.L Group, ask us for a presentation too. This presentation was streamed to other Universities of Chile using the "REUNA" Universities network infrastructure....

For our Spanish audience, here is the talk..:

Hope you enjoy it!

Cheers.

Rhexalion - Alternated Tripod Walk implementation on a Four Wheel/Legs Bio-Inspired Robot

In this post, we would like to share some information about another conceptual robot prototype that we are building and testing for different purposes, one of those purposes would be a "Plan B" in case something goes terrible wrong with our Dandelion design...But even if this new robot is not use it in our next Space Mission to the Moon, there are a lot of potential features and applications that we can apply to this robot here on Earth and even may be in future Space missions...

We call this robot "Rhexalion", because is kind of a mix between "RHex" from Boston Dynamics and our Dandelion design (as a joke we say here that is the result of a drinking night between RHex and Dandelion :-) ...

In this adaptation, our goal is to implement the "Alternate Tripod Walking" that we can find in several insects and that is implemented by RHex with 6 Wheels/Legs, but in this case with just 4 Wheels/Legs, reducing size, weight, power consumption and reduce risk of mechanics failure due to minor amount of mechanical and moving parts...

Here is how the adaptation looks:

The robot is implemented with 4 Stepper Motors of High Torque, an on-board full x86 computer with WiFi (Roboard RB-110), a Sparkfun QueadStepper controller and some sensors...

Here is the explode view of all components:

Here is how it looks after the implementation:

One of the more complicate things was the proper construction and calculations for the motors and the blades. After all, the blade manufacturing was implemented by a pretty smart approach using simple PVC tubes...but we are not going to tell you all the secrets ;-)

To implement the Alternate Tripod Walk in a 4 Wheel/Legs you must synchronize the movement of the Wheels. First, each wheel need 4 blades instead of just the One that we can see on the RHex original design, this is becouse we have less number motors and for that less legs in each corner. Next we need to simple move each motor 45°, the trick is how to initially positioning the blades on the wheels.

On the next picture you can see how the both tripods are formed, in each one both motors at the front rotates exactly 45° to position the next blade on the ground. On the blades in the back part of the robot, one is initially set to allow a blade to touch the ground and the other back motor in a "intermediate" position without any blade touching the ground and forming one of the tripods...Then the same pattern is repeated but this time with the opposite motor with a blade touching the ground and the other in a intermediate position, alternating the tripod formed.   

This walking patter, with a flexible material for the blades, allow a pretty strong and smooth movement for the robot that can travel a wide range of surface, pretty much as the insect since its implement in a engineering way, the abstract concept of the insect walk.

 Here is our little Rhexalion on a flat surface...

 Here is on grass...

On mud...

 On a raw terrain..

 This one is on a really extreme terrain with a slope of about 45°.

 In this picture Rhexalion is coming out of a big whole...

 Here is climbing big rocks..

And finally on small rocks...

As you can see it can cover a big wide range of raw and extreme surfaces, here a couple of videos showing it in action:

Hope you enjoy it...Cheers!

New R.E.A.L Website...

Here at the Robotic & Environmental Algorithms Laboratory (R.E.A.L) of the Universidad Austral de Chile - Campus Puerto Montt, we take the time to re-design and update our Web presence and with special care of our new WebSite.

So, we dusted some of our oldest and advanced robots and software for a shoot session, here is the summary work that soon you are going to be able to see in details in our site, which in a ways summarize the working areas of the R.E.A.L Group at UACh:

Part of out work cover Artificial Intelligence (A.I), specially with Neural Networks, we have a couple of papers about in it applying ANNs to Domotics and other stuff...

 Some time ago, these kind of work was called just "Virtual Reality", but now when you mix data from real work mixed with your virtual world it is called "Augmented Reality"...so yeap, we do have some work about it, also again in the area of Domotics and Environmental Algorithms, mixing real data from devices such lamps, doors/windows, TVs and Audio/Video devices (DVD Players, TV setc, est), mixed with Virtual info in a simulated environment.  Both worlds can work in a united or separated manner...

This one is our "BigFoot", all terrain vehicle, it have a 2D LASER range scanner that with the addition of a couple of Accelerometer is able to recreate a 3D Points Cloud Maps of the surroundings, this allow to the robot to do autonomous navigation and mapping of the areas covered.

You know this one, our beloved "Dandelion" concept Moon Rover prototype as part of our work with the AngelicvM Team fro the Google Lunar X PRIZE competition...

This one is called "HAL", which is a recursive acronym for "Hal with Augmented Logics", but what means "Hal" and again the answer is "Hal with Augmented Logics", so the "H" is always "HAL"...what a mess :-P, it is a way in which we us Nerds seems that we are clever :-S ...The reason for that is that in every iteration we want to add more knowledge about itself to HAL. Currently is at the 0003 version, which mean that we have another 8997 versions to accomplish our final goal of a fully self conscious robot ;-) 

With our 2D LASER Range Finder + a couple of accelerometer, we are able to recreate 3D Points Clouds Mapping, this one is the head of our friend Patricio Palma that sacrifice his head for science :-)

This three robots platforms build ups from simple Netbooks, brings robotics technologies closer to any engineer, specially students, with a simple and sheep Netbook can be use it as a robot vehicle.

We work with the idea of a common PC as a robots from 2003 when this was a pretty new idea, honestly back then we was the second or third project that develop this idea (at least in a public way), other companies takes the idea more seriously and they even sell PC based robotics platform today like the PcBOT 914 from WhiteRobotics, but we came long before they with the PcBot name and basic idea behind...This one is our first version (third iteration) and one of our oldest robot, that's way we called "Matusalen" too :-)

PcBot v1 came to life back in 2003 with his first iteration when an IBM PC or compatible computer was sheep enough to be use it a dedicated way as a robot, before that, the sole idea of use a PC as a robot was crazy due the cost and delicate components of those days computers. Back then for a robot you should develop special circuits to build your robot.

Following the same idea, when basics Notebooks become sheep enough in 2005-200, we create our PcBot v2 or "NoteBot".

This one is pretty new, we build it at the end of last year (basic chassis) and we finish it a couple of weeks ago. Rhexalion is a weird mix of the Rhex hexapod robot concept from Boston Dynamics and some of the main ideas of the Dandelion rover design. Rhexalion is a Bio-Inspired design for raw terrains in which it performs the Alternate Tripod walking algorithm but with just 4 Wheel/Legs instead of the common 6 ones that most hexapod robot use. So far tests are pretty good but there is still a lot of room for improvements...

For about 3 years now, we have a Bioloid Expert Robot Kit biped robot platform, first we focus in bring Linux compatible software to work with this robot (you know, we love Linux and the software from the Robotis company is all just for Windows) and now from last year, we begin to work in direct and inverse kinematics to improve the biped walk of the robot. It is a very hard task and we are moving forward slowly, but is a very interesting area in which we also want to apply A.I and other Technics.

The virtual scene is from Icarus Scene Engine from PointScape.

This Domotic Scene is also a mix between our Robotics and Automation SDK called "monoBOTICS" and the Icarus Scene Engine from PointScape. The idea is that with simple drag-and-drops technics, you can create your office or home environment and with simple setting you can setting your domotics or automation hardware. This later allow to for instance click on your virtual lamp and turn ON or OFF your real lamp, same for TV sets, DVD players, heaters and so on...

Finally also with the help of Icarus from PointScape, we can simple set up some VR Hardware like our custom DataGlobe fro research and develop, focusing in the research that yuo want to do (sing language, augmented reality or wherever) and not spending time creating the virtual represntation of the hand or how to access to the incoming data...

Stay tune for more details about these projects and others in our new R.E.A.L Website at http://www.real.ic.uach.cl.

BTW: Team AngelicvM also have a new shinny Web Site that you can visit at http://www.teamangelicvm.cl

Cheers!

UPDATE!!!

We almost forget these two...At the left is a shoot from 3DSharpView software, the cool thing is that it use mono-C# plus openni with the Kinect Depth Camera to get the rgb and depth data, so is a cross-platform software to work at high level language for map reconstruction, object analysis and recognition among others.

This one is a cool adaptation for a Power  Wheelchair, with a simple PC interface and a basic Netobook you can control the chair by keyboard, mouse pad, Wiimote and Face recognition.
For the first two is simple, but with a traditional Wiimote things gets interesting. As a wireless device is very confortable, lightweight, configurable gadget to control the chair. The user can adjust the movements that are comfortable for him to operate the chair, sensitivity on the Wiimote can also be adjusted. The user can attach the device on arms, legs or other part of the body that can be easily move it.

The Face Recognition is kind of tricky, since depth info is not easy to get with a simple 2 Mega pixel Netbot camera, the trick is more to set the proper amount of movements of the face (Up, Down, Left and Right) to produce the movement. Is a very initial implementation but it proves to be useful in certain scenarios and there is a lot of room for improvements and future development.



A pictures of the gang...

Science Café "The Challenge of the First Chilean Moon Robot"

Las month (Agost 13) we was invited to a "Science Café" to give a talk about the Dandelion rover and the Angelicvm Team in general.

The talk was called "The Challenge of the First Chilean Moon Robot" and it was performed at the "Erika" restaurant here in Puerto Montt, Chile.

Here the poster and invitation that use two beautiful pictures of our rover at the MMars in the Atacama desert (text is in Spanish).

The activity was very cool, I feel that we get a very good acceptance of people, lot of questions, lots of smiles...and a long talk in an event that is different from a traditional academic talk here at the University, people are more loose to do any kind of questions, more confidence to talk about all the challenge...

There was about 30 people, the restaurant had 3 floors and the talk was at the first one, good music, nice German food and a good ambient.

Here are the guys of REAL at the end of the talk for the deserved applause for the hard work..

...and me looking like I'm preparing to whistling...but, no, I was talking :-)

May be we are going to have other of this Science Café at Concepción at the end of September, still unsure, but we hope that we can do another soon...

Stay tune!..