My father-in-law is very generous. Recently he bought me Almost Human by Lee Gutkind, a book of stories about a variety of robotics research. Most stories center around the CMU Robotics Institutes’s various projects pushing the envelope of autonomous robot behavior, although the most interesting story is about Manuela Veloso’s vision for RoboCup.

Another interesting topic is about the CMU Zoë project, a research project in the Chilean desert for an autonomous platform capable of conducting a search for biological elements without human intervention. The navigation and science packages may someday be included in a rover destined for Mars. In fact the author spends the majority of pages on this project, likely because it has sensational appeal, and because the author traveled to the location to watch one of the several exercises.

The book also touches on some of the people involved in these projects. The human element really comes through, and its nice to hear the researches are willing, and able, to bond emotionally with the machines they create. In my opinion the true test of robotics intelligence will be when a robot is able to establish a similar emotional bond with people.

I’d recommend this book although it’s definitely not a technical resource like The Principals of Robot Motion, but still it can be inspiring for people who make robots. I really like the idea that robotics research is progressing by leaps and bounds in my lifetime. I’m looking forward to seeing autonomous robotic researchers crawling the surface of the Moon and Mars as well as the first robot-human soccer game. I wonder who will win such a match?

The Western Canadian Robotics Society held their annual event this past weekend, and I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to attend again. This year the event was held at the Aero Space Museum out near the Calgary airport.

Once again, it was a great event! I captured a number of photos and short video clips (not always the best quality, sorry) here. I haven’t had a chance to clean them up or even give them proper titles and descriptions yet, but maybe you’ll enjoy them anyways.

In addition to the minisumo events there were the classic events of line following and mine sweeper. There was also a nice First Lego League demonstration. Since I was flying and had to bring my robots on the plane, I only took my two minisumos: Velox and The Thin Man. As you could imagine, I had to put them in my suitcase, there was no way I would be allowed on the flight with something that is basically a sharp chunk of metal.

There were eight minisumos competing in the “advanced” class this year. It took six rounds to declare The Thin Man the first place winner, while Velox took third place. Craig Limber’s Sayonar Sucker had an excellent day and earned second place. It helped that Dave Hylands wasn’t attending this year, he is going to PDXBot.07 this coming weekend instead.

It was a lot of fun again this year and you can be certain I’ll plan to go again next year.

I’ve been playing with the CFAX 128 x 64 pixel graphical LCD from Spark Fun. This is a really nifty graphical display that includes a four-wire resistive touch screen and white backlight. The picture here (click it to see the larger version) has the backlight turned off and you can see it’s still pretty visible.

I decided to write some simple code to draw text and rectangles. The picture shows that stuff pretty well. I also got the touch screen logic working but that isn’t really demonstrated in the picture.

I’ve hooked it up to an AVR Mega 88 on a prototyping board, which gives just barely enough output pins to drive it. I will probably switch to a 40-pin Mega 16 to complete my experiments, as I want to use it with my on-going CAN project; it will require a few more i/o pins that what the 28-pin Mega 88 has available. The idea is to make the LCD available to all CAN nodes in a larger, multi-processor robot suitable for the SRS Robomagellan contest or something similar.

The display has its own memory buffer for the 128 x 64 pixel grid and also has about ten different icons above the top row. It’s pretty simple to interface, and fortunately Spark Fun has some useful sample code here. I also found some sample code from the original manufacturer here.

I also found a nifty article in a recent Circuit Cellar that gave me some inspiration. Look for the issue that covers various video, LCD and LED display projects. My long-term goal is to assemble all of my AVR software into an open source package under the GPL. When I get around to doing it I’ll post it here.

I just finished uploading some more photos of the most recent minisumo project The Thin Man. You can see the whole project here.

This was one of my more ambitious projects and I’m really pleased with how it turned out. There is more work to do though. I’ve got to find a new, stronger battery that will still fit in the same form factor as the original one is just too weak for the latest GM11 motors I installed.

And I will probably make a new circuit board, those wire patches just look too ugly and I want to improve the layout of the line sensors and will probably raise the forward-looking sensors slightly.

And I really, really need to write some good software for it. I never did figure out what was wrong with the sensors at Robothon, but I’m sure its a software problem.

Hope you find the project as interesting as I did. The next likely competition I will enter will be the Western Canadian Robot Games, typically held in May every year in Calgary. I went out there this past May (pictures here) and had a great time but next year I will have a really cool minisumo to show off!

This coming Saturday – October 21st – the Vancouver Robotics Club will host its annual Robot Games event where we invite all robot builders to come out and show off their creations.

This year’s event will be held at BCIT, in Building SW2, Room “Town Square D.” The fun starts at 11am and will run until approximately 4pm, with breaks for lunch and robot repairs and such.

Events include line following, robotic sumo wrestling (Lego and two classes of autonomous minisumo), a walking & crawling robot triathlon, solar speeder races, and photovore competitions. Promises to be a lot of fun for everyone.

Details available here.

Hope to see you there!