Posted by Tim
Filed under: RoboCup
Insite South Africa
Tonight I'm going on a trip to South Africa. The AllemaniACs, impersonated by my boss Alexander Ferrein and myself, will present the winning robot Hannibal from this year's RoboCup@Home competition at the International Science Innovation & Technology Exhibition (INSITE 2006).
We will show a few tasks with the robot like navigation in the environment. The conference is held in Johannesburg, South Africa which is kinda cool (although this means sitting on the plane for abou ten hours...). This will be the longest RoboCup-trip up to now.
There is already some press coverage for example in the article "The German techno connection" from The Star.
For more info have a look on our brand-new and shiny RoboCup website.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: University
RWTH mensa database fixed
I have fixed up the generation of mensa food databases. Thanks Holger J. for pointing this out. Mensa M6 has been closed and so it has been removed from the database as well.
This change also affects Mensa WAP and jMensa. I have also added an easier cross-mensa navigation to the WAP interface to make hopping easier to find what you like.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: Personal
Too hot
It's way too hot!
About 30° in my room is way too much. It's unfortunate if you have a room with a window from northwest to southwest. This way the sun is shining into my room from dusk till noon and gets me to operating temparature.
Looking forward to the weekend. As last weekend I will go swimming with my little brother and the dog. That's fun in the evening. Although it got harder to find a place where dogs are tolerated this year. But there are still some more or less hidden places where this is possible.
But anyway the work has to be done. Currently on the plan is the Google Summer of Code (NetworkManager dialup support), which takes most of the time now. But the code is growing. The first QA app for the first part revealed some smaller problems in the current code that should be fixed today so that I can go on to the next fun part: integrating the ppp-manager into the NM core. Besides that I have to finish a seminar paper and evaluate cameras for the maybe-coming new robots and my diploma thesis which is the fun part (besides swimming with the dog and lying in the Rheinpark with Anne) these days.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: RoboCup
RoboCup 2006: World Champion!
During the last week we, the AllemaniACs, participated in the RoboCup 2006 world championship in robot soccer and home service robotics.
And after several days of hard work (and months before the event) we are now the World Champion in the RoboCup@home league about service robotics.
The @home league consisted of four qualification tasks, which where following a human in the environment, navigate to special point of interest, to manipulate the world with an actuator (like fetching the newspaper or opening the front door) and an open challenge where you could do what you can do best. After this round the best five went to the finals and had another open challenge which were a jury then decided and the winner. The first three tasks all had two phases, a "proof of concept" phase where you had to show that it works and could add some additional constraints to make it easier (only follow the trainer, enter navigation points via keyboard etc.) and a second "general applicability" without these. Since we do not have an actuator or manipulator like a hand we couldn't participate in the manipulator task. Only one team from the Carnegie Mellon University managed to get this task done, winning them the first place in the first round. Nobody managed to get any second phase done. The major problem here was the unavailability of good speech recognition software and problems with all the loud noise around. We failed in the second phase of the follow human task just before the end point and in the navigate challenge because of the mentioned speech recognition stuff. Our free challenge was particularly interesting in regard to the "real" human flesh-and-blood soccer world championship: Our robot searched for a box of beer hidden somewhere in the environment, gripped it (with a passive gripper that was specifically designed by us for that task) and brought it to the sofa. For the finals we extended that task by allowing the jury to decide for one of two different kinds of beer. So after deciding on a kind of beer the robot fetched the appropriate box - for this we used a combination of camera vision and laser scanner to detect boxes and decide for the correct one.
The event was quiet exhausting and I'm now getting through the emails and getting back into normal mode (the strange one with enough sleep and food). More to come about the event later.
Posted by Tim
Filed under: SoC 2006
SoC Wiki
I have setup a SoC Wiki to help us organize things like local meetings and to be a central place to put information. It may also be a good place if you need space to present information about your work. So stop by and help out.
