We Moved two new G5s into the Lab, one in each room. This is on top of the new Dell laptop we have now. If you can’t find a computer in the lab, you’re certainly not trying at all.
New G5s
Leave a reply
Category Archives: RoboCup
Wireless Up
Aibos and Wireless are friends once again. Make sure to load the Comm module whenever you boot up the aibo. Thanks especially to John Keimel and Alec (from home, nonetheless). So from here: George is furiously into the Communications module. Great stuff all around.
Rumblings from the Lab…
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }
This is how Computer Science students roll: with 16 fps Overhead cameras to improve our localization parameters.
Notice aibo10 flipped over on his back as well.
Now that our overhead camera works (looks great when you transfer the feed to the plasma), our lab is nearing 100% awesomeness.
Tragedy Befalls the Aibo World
The rumors are true, from the Robocup Committee itself:
Dear 4-legged RoboCuppers,
I have just received an e-mail from Minoru Asada that Sony announced that
they will stop to produce AIBO by the end of this March. As long as they
have AIBOs, they will sell them. The services such as repairing and parts
exchanges will continue for about 7 years after they stopped the production.Sony decided to completely withdraw from robotics related activities.
In 2006, we will hold the Four-legged robot league competition as planned.
After that, we have to discuss what we will do (especially the TC).Best regards
Thomas Röfer
UPDATE:: More, From the Sony Aibo representative, to the Robocup 4legged League mailing list:
Dear all,
As Asada-san sent the email, Sony announced that Sony discontinues
production of AIBO.Since the beginning, AIBO has grown up with RoboCup. We very much appreciate
all of your understanding and support for AIBO and Sony’s activities. I know
the discussion about a platform in four-legged robot league and appreciate
the decision to use AIBO as the platform for RoboCup 2006. I appreciate to
it and I regret that Sony made this decision though it is your supports.Personally it is very sad to stop AIBO production, but as Kitano-san
mentioned
it is a new start for next evolution for RoboCup.I believe your success in RoboCup 2006!!
Thank you.—- Masahiro
Meeting Friday
12:30 PM Robot Lab, Friday.
We’ll be fully going by this point, with every independent study student having a working knowledge of the Robocup code.
This meeting is on friday for this week only. It will move once every independent study student forwards their full class schedule, as well as any other commitments you have 9-5 on Monday through Friday, to Ferd.
Crash Course
OK, after ~4 introductions to our code structure, things are going smoothly. I’ve had good meetings with Matt, Yi, Keith, and Jesse. Here’s the current schedule (meet in the lab):
Monday-9pm-Quentin, George, Mort
Tuesday-2:30pm-Oliver, Tracy
Wednesday-4pm-George, Ferd, Mort
Thursday-11am-Pat
Thursday-2:30pm-Jeremy, maybe John (Friedman?)
Friday-2pm-Allison
Setting up Cygwin under Windows
For any of you that have a windows machine and want to use it – here’s what you do.
First of all you download cygwin from here. This is a setup file, it will ‘guide’ you through the setup process, but not too much since it is a linux application and they believe in the intelligence of their users. Basically, if you go clicking next until the thing goes away, you won’t get what you need. You need to check that you have a few programs which don’t come back with the official bundle. I suppose you can download the whole thing, but it’s something in the order of 800 MB, so I don’t know how useful that will be.
Anyways, what you need to get on there:
These might also be useful.
You can always rerun the setup and choose additional packages that you need.
Now we need the OPEN-R libraries from their official website.
I can’t give a direct link because there is a login part, and you’ll need to register (if you haven’t already). So, get these from in there somewhere:
Extract them in /cygwin/usr/local. Now you should have everything you need to compile open-r related c files. I hope I’m not just clogging up the place and annoying people with this.
Note: semi-copied from here. I just took out the essential, but you can check out the original. I take no credit for it. It’s how I set up my own cygwin.
Design
Architecture is really a tough call now. I need to pick an overall design of Aperios Objects (modules) and keep it stable until the end of the year. I’m probably going to have one for vision (plus Python hooks), motion, and communication. And how to link various bits of code for each module? Common header files? Namespaces? Heck–I could do like UPenn and just have one Aperios object for everything.
Hello, World!
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }
After many frustrating days and numerous debugging styles, I’ve finally gotten Python to run on Aperios!
I’ve often read that good Programmers are not amazingly proficient coders but they instead excel at debugging their own code. Boy–do I need to get better at this. The technique that finally got things going was taking the entirety of the 2005 rUNSWift code and widdling it down to the Python layer. This allowed me to step incrementally while making sure things stay working. Long process–but I learned heaps about Aperios, Python, and C++ in general.
Onward!
Ridiculous
But awesome: this just in from the official 4 Legged League mailing list:
There has been some discussion about organising a demonstration robocup game in Bremen – 11×11 Aibos on a mid-sized field. The thought is to try and make it a pick-up match (using the same ideas that UNSW and Newcastle used in the legged open challenge last year – a standardized broadcast packet for comms). This would require access to a mid-sized field.
How many legged teams might be interested in participating?
We’ve got 11 aibos…Chown-dog ?