Posted by Tim
Filed under: Geek
UniMatrix 1.2 released
After three years I have released UniMatrix 1.2 yesterday. It fixes two long-standing bugs. UniMatrix is a program for Palm OS that allows for managing courses, classes and exams on your handheld released under the GPL.
Although time is short while playing around a bit with Maemo I got interested again in handheld programming and setup the Palm tool chain once again. That procedure feels more arcane than last time. Have to write that down when time permits. It's awesome though that you can have a free tool chain, besides the SDK containing the system libs to link against and the header files.
Maemo is an interesting platform. I'm still playing with it but most of the application I wanted to port needed only a very few changes. Though I'm disappointed that basically all Gtkmm-related libraries are missing for the arm target by default. Currently building a whole bunch of packages and dependencies...
Posted by Tim
Filed under: RoboCup
Back from South Africa
For the last two weeks I've been in South Africa to work with our fellow researchers and present our robots.
For our participation in the Standard Platform league with the Nao robots we are cooperating with the University of Cape Town (UCT) and TU Graz. I've been to Cape Town to work with our fellows from the Robotics and Agents Research Lab at the UCT. I gave presentations of our robot software framework that we've developed during the last two years to get more students interested. We discussed the future of the project and how to proceed from the current state. Since we have to robots for not even half a year a lot of work remains to be done. I'm confident however that with joint forces we can achieve a good result for next year's RoboCup event.
Along the way we installed Fedora on two Mac Laptops. Once as a virtual machine and once via boot camp. Both worked just fine and allowed for efficient usage of our robot software framework. Although Slackware and Ubuntu are more dominant in that lab Fedora is the only distro at the moment providing all required libararies out-of-the-box, as I maintain a few of the required packages. Our new robot software framework is Open Source software and we plan for a first public release around the end of this year.
After the research meating I flew to Johannesburg were we were invited by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to participate on the German booth at the The International Science, Innovation and Technology Exhibition 2008 (INSITE). We've been to the last INSITE as well in 2006, so we met a lot of people again that participated a second time as well. It was fun again to discuss with all the science people various topics and get to know what others are doing.
We presented one of our Nao robots and the research cooperation with the UCT. There was a second robotics booth Robotics SA sponsored by the IEEE comprised of several South African universities and research facilities showing their robots. Our colleagues from the UCT were there demonstrating their custom-made small size league robots, allowing remote control by visitors, and another of our Nao robots.
The event attracted more visitors overall than last time. Though the audience wasn't fully what we would have liked to see. There were only a few university lecturers and not as many students as we expected, although Johannesburg itself having two universities and Pretoria with another two international universities only being a one-hour drive away. Besides that we had several interesting conversations and Alex gave a short talk at the Robotics SA booth about the RoboCup idea.
Afterall I'd say it was a pretty successful trip to South Africa,xturl and a fascinating one. In Cape Town I had two days where I could meet with other students and where I saw some of the country side and I went up to Table Mountain which gave a great view over the city. In Johannesburg I had half a day were I went to the Apartheid Museum. Besides the wealth of information about recent South African history it provides it was very impressing. I went there with a friend from India. We bought tickets - and I got one for whites and she for non-whites. A guard was guiding us to the "matching" entrance. That was really weird. You then walk separated ways inside the first building only communicating through a curtain with each other. The texts are different on boths sides so you have to tell each other what it's all about. She said "ok, just get out and take the back entrance to see this picture here". Sounded like a good idea, I left the building and then... realized that you had to get up to an elevated way that guided you past the non-white exit. Just after 10 meters or so you could then go back and down to be able to get to the other side. But by then we decided to go on. A really weird experience that just felt wrong...
There are some photos from the INSITE 2008 in our gallery. We've also recently uploaded pictures from RoboCup 2008 in Suzhou, China.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: RoboCup
No Hat Trick
RoboCup 2008 in Suzhou is over. We became second in the RoboCup@Home league world championship!
After a not-so good stage 1 we really needed a better stage 2 to advance to the finals. We did the "Walk & Talk" test. In this test the robot follows the human which teaches it new locations. When five locations (given by the referees) have been learned the robot switches to navigation phase and has to go to these places in an order specified by the refs. The problem of this test is, that the scenario is re-arranged just before the test is done, so one can not have a pre-generated map of the environment. On the first try one application wasn't started properly after subversion caused some headaches and so we did not get any points. We did the test again on the next day. We got the full 2000 points and were the only team to get the maximum score in any stage 2 test! We also did the party bot, but a bug prevented positive face recognitions to be reported properly so we only got a few points here. After stage 2 we were the team with the most total points in the tournament.
The final is an open test, where each team can do a performance. A jury with three members decide by some given criteria like performance, scientific value and human-robot interaction. The er@ser team from Japan made it first. We became second...
It was a pretty exhausting event. Now we're heading to see some night life of Suzhou before we leave for Shanghai tommorrow. I will write more about this RoboCup later, also something about our involvement in the Standard Platform League with the Nao robots -- after I got some sleep after the last week with an average of about 4 hours of sleep or so per night...
Posted by Tim
Filed under: RoboCup
Fedora at RoboCup
We arrived on Sunday in Suzhou, China. All went pretty smoothly and there are dozens of volunteers and staff that makes it a pleasant stay. There is a 20 min bus shuttle that we take every morning to the venue. A continuously updated short report is on our RoboCup website.
As you can see on the photo we have put Fedora stickers at prominent places on our robots (there is one at the back side as well). It fostered some interest. I was talking to a member of the executive committee for the RoboCup@Home league. He liked the idea of a LiveCD with robotics software on it. A few other guys were asking "what is that T-Shirt about?"... Quite cool, hope to spawn more interest in Fedora in the RoboCup community.
The first tests didn't went as smooth as expected. In the first test, where the robot introduces itself to the audience and other teams, showing its abilities, sensors and actuator we needed a restart. A textile cover of the robot hang into the laser scanner which put it into "escape mode", a mode where it's moving forward slowly to get away from the obstacle. After the restart it went smooth but time was short. The fast follow went pretty well. Masrur "ran" through the environment with the robot following. Unfortunately the other team from Koblenz didn't make it in time so they started late an we couldn't demonstrate our passing capabilities. So after the first two tests we were first.
The next two tests we screwed up because of wifi problems. Yesterday we had the lost and found test, where the robot has to find three objects that are randomly placed in the environment. We implemented a new object detection and were quite keen to see it in action. But then the wifi broke down for no visible reason and we couldn't start the application... Today we did the who-is-who challenge. Also a challenge were we introduced new code, now for face detection and recognition and using a new way to formulate the application. We had wifi problems - again. Just after that we found out that it was the microphone that was put on the robot to make the text-to-speech output heard. We did a test with a busy ssh session. If you turned the microphone on the session would immediately stall, and when you turned it off it would continue immediately. The other microphone isn't as bad, this is why it worked in the first two tests flawlessly...
After the first days with two screwed up tests we are currently third (results). Tomorrow will be the open challenge, where every team can demonstrate what it can do best with their robot. After that the stage 2 tests will start where only 10 of the attending 14 teams are allowed to compete. From these 5 teams will compete in the finals on Sunday. Let's see how this works out.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: News
China here we come
RoboCup 2008 is only a few days away and we're preparing for our journey...
My stuff is packed, at least most of it. I have an additional suitcase containing one of the Nao robots that I will have to take to China. This limits the weight we can take about half...
Max Spevack's package with Fedora goodies arrived today, juts in time for the event. Thanks Max! So I will place some Fedora stickers on the robots and I hope to foster some questions and spawn some interest for the Fedora Robotics SIG. We have put this SIG on our team description poster as a community contribution! Next year we will have that funky robotics LiveCD!
Stay tuned for more, will take some pictures and do some blogging, given that we have Internet access in China...
