Robot battle!

While I'm not sure I agree with their statement about this pushing the field of robotics foreword, I think it's a step in the right direction for sure.  Plus the team of people involved in helping them makes me think that they will be creating a pretty awesome robot. Check it out!

Here is the kicker starter page for the MegaBots robot duel. I will probably be throwing some money their way.
kickstarter page

Aint no rest for the wicked

Look up these topics:

1. Kalman Filtering for mobile robots and quadrotors
2. Extended and Unscented Kalman filtering 
3. Finish ARDrone SDK 3 to ROS interface 
4. Fishing pulling apart needed code for new ARDrone package
5. SLAM research
6. Cooperative control papers 

Things to do for the fall semester:

1. Finish python overview
2. Look up hadoop and Open MPI

Things to do for my own side projects:

1. Build a robot for fun research 
2. Buy Odriod 

Engineers never sleep...

Pluto Flyby is happening! This is why I became an engineer

UAS videos

I always forget that I want to upload these videos so I can find them easily.  These videos are from my Intelligent Robotics Project the group one.

DRC Finals!

     So the last update for the day will be just a post about the DRC (DARPA Robotics Challenge) Finals that are taking place right now!  I am extremely jealous of these people working on these systems. The picture below is an overview of each robot that is competing in this challenge.

Courtesy of IEEE SPECTRUM


In order to live stream it here is the link for that.  So far it's a lot of fun to watch, if you like robotics, the first round was so sad to watch because no one scored points or even got past the first obstacle. Well back to watching this on my lunch!

Summer Work

     So the plan was to take a summer course but that fell through because I got the dates for the last day to register mixed up with the last day to pay tuition. Missed it by one day and the office wouldn't accept it. Lame, I know but I still have work to do for the summer. I am part of a research team working on cooperative controls with five different projects that are being developed.  I am on three of those projects which means my summer is going to be very busy. For one I need to derive the mathematical model for quadrotors and for some ground rovers which is not an easy task but it's the fun part of the controls process. Next I will have to work on learning VSLAM (Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) which I have never touched before. That will not be an easy task to complete in the slightest.  As for the last one I'm not too sure what the plan is since it deals with cloud computing and swarms.

     So there's a lot of work to be done this summer that will hopefully result in some progress for my dissertation.  Also I'm going to try to have some smaller quicker updates in order to get into the habit of posting. This is an entirely new concept to me so please bear with me.  

Work, School, and late posts

     So things have gotten crazy since the semester started and I haven't had time to keep posting at all though the semester.  I just want to put it out there that I grossly miscalculated how much time working full time and taking two PhD level class would take. I had no time for really anything and something tells me it's going to get even worse.  I'm going to try to do it one more time this fall semester by taking Cloud Computing and wither a class on ROS (Robot Operating System) or a Java/Python class.  it will be a lot of work but I still need to take classes. I'm going to try and keep this update short as a kind of semester overview.

      This semester I took two classes Intelligent Robotics and Digital Signals Processing (DSP).  Both of these class were very time consuming especially Robotics.  Every homework was a mini project such as single/double inverted pendulum control using Fuzzy Logic, control of the Puma 560 arm, inverse and forward kinematics, etc. I then had two projects to work on before we took the final. Project 1 was about method of spacecraft. I did this first off because it is the reason I am working on my PhD, and secondly because I'm interested in building a satellite system for my PhD. I'm still not sure about the end goal yet but at least it was a start.  The second project I did was a team project, where the main goal was to control a formation of two quadrotors as they move though the lab from point to point.  This was a team project so we worked n control, communications, and vision with the Kinect. At the end of the project we were unable to close the vision loop but my professor was so impressed that we had proof of two quadrotors flying with the same controller on the same ground station.  Next DSP was a super intense class that involved signal and image processing.  This class would have been a better class had the professor taught in a more organized format instead of his teaching style. While I have my own issues at this class this is neither the time nor the space to air these grievances. Needless to say this class help me back from taking the PhD qualifying exam by about 5 points.  So now I have to decide if I want to retake the class or if I want to take a different class, in the end I will most likely retake the class.

      In other news I got a paper published in the IEEE Systems Conference, that was held in Vancouver Canada this year. That was an amazing experience for both networking and for touring that wonderful city. The paper was titled "Autonomous Controller Design for an Orbital Debris Chaser Craft". This was based off of my Master's Thesis but the paper only focused on the controller aspect not the full system that I designed. That was definitely a great experience and I wouldn't trade it for the world.

     This week I will update this blog more on the conference, videos from the projects and summer plans. For now I think this is a good place to stop for a semester update.