Servo - August 2010

bots IN BRIEF

I’M IN THE NAVY NOW!

About a year ago, Nexi took part in a somewhat silly (but reasonably effective) demonstration of a robotic role on a US Navy vessel. Guess the Navy was impressed, because they now own one of their very own. This Nexi is named Octavia.

The Navy hopes to use Octavia to explore how humans and robots interact, with the aim of minimizing the amount of time that humans spend dealing with a robotic interface and maximizing the amount of information that can be communicated. Octavia specifically is good for things like this because of her intensely expressive (and somewhat uncanny) face and head.

SOCCER IT TO ME

In human World Cup soccer watch humans have pretty much peaked. Really, the only thing about the game that evolves reliably from cup to cup is the ball. Robots, on the other hand, have no such limitations. Carnegie Mellon’s small-size robotic soccer team (CMDragons) has taken another step towards robot domination by teaching these small size soccer bots the physics of ball movement. A robot that knows physics is pitted against a robot that doesn’t. The robots are autonomous and are controlled by a computer that watches the action on an overhead camera.

Without modeling the physics of the ball, the computer just tries to position the robots on the ball without taking the movement of the ball into account.A physical model allows the computer to move the robot predicatively, greatly improving its skill.

OPEN QBO

The Corpora has started up a YouTube channel devoted to their open source robotics project, Qbo. Their first video shows the stereo camera calibration method.

GET YOUR ZEN ON

Among the robots that were presented at the Shanghai World Expo 2010 was Aldebaran Robotics’ NAO (representing France).A large group of them performed Tai Chi motions in unison much to the thrill and amazement of attendees.