Posted by Tim
Filed under: Personal
Ella and balls
Yesterday we tried playing with a tennis ball - Ella enjoyed it.
Today we tried playing with Ella with a ball that I got from Kuka at RoboCup in Atlanta - about twice the size of the tennis ball. But this one was not as robust as a tennis ball so it lasted only for less than five minutes until Ella bit a nice hole in the ball. But being able to squeeze the ball made it even more interesting.
So I'm really looking forward to the day when we don't need the leash all the time. We will get a short preview next weekend when we visit my parents with the big garden...
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Personal
Ella!
Anne and I got a new flat mate: Ella, our new dog!
After visiting her a few times in the animal shelter yesterday was the day when they allowed us to take her with us.
Of course you expect it but I have to say it anyway: we are so lucky that we got here. She is absolutely quiet in the flat, she reacts to commands already, she slept all night at the place we prepared for her, and she likes to retrieve sticks and tennis balls - it couldn't be better for a first day. She can also be bribed easily with treats, so the pre-conditions are great for more training.
The weather is really lousy and rainy at the moment. Ella doesn't really enjoy it to go outside if it rains so a short walk was up to now all we did.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: RoboCup
Mom, I'm on TV!
As mentioned in my last post we took some "pictures". In fact we had a team of the WDR TV station at home. We, the AllemaniACs@Home department demonstrated our final challenge of this year's RoboCup in Atlanta.
In the beginning it was quite frustrating because it just wouldn't work, and we had no clue why. The robot would recognize the cup and try to grasp it just fine. But then it wouldn't detect that the cup actually is perfectly in the gripper and so would not actually grip it. It turned out that with the strong lights of the camera team the infrared sensor got irritated and wouldn't respond. So we put two layers of tape inside the cup to make it less transparent. Then the gripper recognized it and it went just fine. I was sitting right next to the robot during all 20 tries or so, so you could probably cut a series of amused, frustrated, angry, clueless etc. facial expressions, something like "typical RoboCup experience in 20 seconds"...
We then drove back to the lab and took a few shots there. This was also where I got interviewed. The author told me he liked my answers so there is a good chance this snippet will make it into the final clip, which you can see on Lokalzeit Aachen next Wednesday. They told us it would air on Aktuelle Stunde and maybe even country wide at some time, but for this they cannot supply us with dates. We are pretty excited what they make out of the footage.
The basic topics are basic achievements, major problems, FUD in the public etc.. Especially the fear has to be reduced. Many people think about iRobot-like stories with crazy going robots taking over the world or at least robots as job killers. But if we think 20 to 30 years ahead there will be so many elderly people that it will be a tough problem to find enough personnel to care about them. Then at least basic tasks like handing over the menu etc. could be done by robots while the humans that we still have can concentrate on the important work, communicating with these people, helping them, washing them. But in fact the biggest problem these days is not having an accurate model of the robot (our robot currently only knows about it's basic size, but not that it has stuff on top of it for instance) and thus in some (rare) circumstances it can run into your furniture, leaving a small kerf or so. But we are getting better at this.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: RoboCup
Robot in da house
Today caesar, our current world champion robot visits us.
It has already looked around in the flat and learned about the environment. It already did some runs of this year's final challenge: bringing a cup from one place in the room to another. This utilizes a stereo vision image recognition system and our brand new manipulator...
The reason for the visit is that we need a real home environment for taking some pictures. More on that tommorrow.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Blog
Just because you are paranoid...
...doesn't mean they're not watching you...
A comment to the video Monster Among Us by the ACLU about the way to a surveillance society. Especially since there is all this FUD everywhere about ever worse threats that make it necessary to have our own magic lantern or carnivore this really is a hot topic here (and almost everywhere I guess) these days. There is a nice long article in the German wikipedia about searching your computer online by law enforcement agencies if they don't like your nose or so. It seems that they just lower the entry barrier to make it easier to snoop and on the other side increase the tools to snoop deeper.
I feel better making encrypted backups to DVD -- just in case that we can't stop Stasi 2.0 from happening.
Thinking about the FUD spread about terrorism and how it is used by some people to push through there plans I dug around a bit. There is a whole (english) section about international terrorism at Spiegel Online. My current favorites are the "news" about dirty bombs and the idea to shoot down civil air planes if there might be a terroristic threat from that plane.
Just to give a few notes why these are my favorites for the first I recommend reading an article by Richard A. Muller about the dirty bomb distraction in Technology Review (german translation). In this article he describes how low the risk of a dirty bomb actually is and gives some numbers why just telling about such a bomb is the big deal. This article dates back from 2004 and at least some do not seem to have read it. For the crazy to shoot down you or me while flying over Germany the minister of defense is ignoring a ruling by the Constitutional Court that this would be illegal! They already tried this to make a law but it's against the constitution, and they would still do it! In reports on TV it turned out that during the soccer world championship in Germany last year they had selected fighter pilots that would have shot. They had to do this because Germany soldiers have to deny an order that is against the law - these pilots would have had to act against the law, and it seems they found a few who would have done it. These days even officials from the Germany military recommend to all pilots to refuse to obey such an order.
And it gets worse. It seems that they dig up new stories every week so that in the end that they can get whatever law they want to make us "safe". I'd really like to be at the 9/22 demo but I can't make it. Hopefully enough others have the chance to get there.
