In case you’re new to the Trossen Robotics Community, here’s a quick refresher on how this contest works:  First, all kinds of fantastically talented and dedicated people come to our Project Showcase forum to tell us all about the projects they’ve been working on.  Periodically, we (the Trossen Robotics team) sort through these projects, and score them very scientifically in the following categories: "Wow" factor, Ingenuity, creativity, and presentation (this includes graphics, videos, documentation, explanation, etc.).  This is the fourth contest we’ve run here at Trossen Robotics, and the projects just keep getting cooler!  This time around, we extended the deadline and upped the stakes.  Since the last contest, the community has grown and expanded well beyond our expectations, and this has resulted in some of the best work we’ve seen yet.  If you showed off your project in our Project Showcase forum, give yourself a big ol’ pat on the back.  Now, let’s get to the meat and potatoes.  Here are the runners-up and winners, in suspense-building ascending order!

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Honorable Mention

Project: "Johnny 5.3"

Creator: Andrew Alter (Tyberius)

We’ve been working a little too closely with Andrew to let him enter the contest, but we can’t totally leave him hanging.  He’s been building a "Johnny 5"-inspired humanoid/trackbot hybrid, and it’s really coming together.  His brain (Johnny’s, not Andrew’s) is a Pico-ITX running Windows XP Pro.  It has a vocal synthesizer, great big grippers, a reinforced suspension system, a snarky personality, and I’ve heard that it drives around harassing Andrew’s baby.  It’s the embodiment of robotic awesomeness, in other words.  Check out his thread, picture gallery, and his blog.

Runners-Up

Project: "Leviskate"

Creator: Rodger Cleye
Average Score: 7.63 / 10
Prize: $20 Trossen Robotics Gift Certificate!

The Leviskate is a "self-balancing motorboard."  Kind of like a Segway for people who really like head injuries.  Seriously though, this contraption is truly awesome.  There are some cool videos in Rodger’s thread, too.  Our favorite thing about the videos is that Rodger sounds genuinely amazed that it actually works.

Project: "The Bratinator Project"

Creator: SN96
Average Score: 7.67 / 10
Prize: $20 Trossen Robotics Gift Certificate!

It walks, it talks, it scares the kids.  It’s… the Bratinator.  Built around the Lynxmotion Brat biped, this monstrosity features speech, binaural hearing, a custom-machined aluminum head.

Project: "Gepetto"

Creator: darkback2
Average Score: 8.25 / 10
Prize: $20 Trossen Robotics Gift Certificate!

It really pains us to see Gepetto in the runners up, instead of placing in a cash-winning position, but sometimes that’s just the way it goes.  This was a very close race.  This bot is beautifully made from wood and metal, has a really cool suspension system, carries its laptop brain around with it, and is programmed with some really interesting behavior/mood software.  That’s really just the tip of the iceberg, so you’ll have to read through the thread to see Gepetto’s full story.

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Third Place

Project: "eyeRobot"
Creator: Nathaniel Barshay
Average Score: 8.38 / 10
Prize: $100 Trossen Robotics Gift Certificate!

The eyeRobot is a robotic guide for people with vision impairments.  It has a whole slew of IR and ultrasonic range sensors for collision avoidance, and pathfinding software to keep it moving through the clearest area.  This was a proof-of-concept prototype meant to "marry the simplicity of the traditional white cane with the instincts of a seeing-eye dog."  This project is going places, and hopefully one day it will help other people go places.

Second Place

Project: "Frameless Laser Harp"
Creator: Stephen Hobley
Average Score: 8.88 / 10
Prize: $250 Trossen Robotics Gift Certificate!

Twenty-two years ago, he saw Jean-Michel Jarre play a laser harp at a concert, and from that day he’s been on a mission.  This mission finally came to fruition last month, when he completed his own laser harp, and let me tell you, it’s a pretty stunning piece of equipment.  Using a galvanometer to very rapidly and precisely aim a pulsing laser, light sensors to detect where a beam has been interrupted, and an Arduino brain; the harp sends MIDI control signals to a synthesizer.

First Place

Project: "Phoenix"
Creator: KÃ¥re Halvorsen
Average Score: 9.63 / 10
Prize: $500 Trossen Robotics Gift Certificate!

Phoenix is a six legged walking robot.  Wait, we know some of you out there may be thinking that hexapod robots are old hat.  Well, you’re wrong.  So very wrong.  Wait until you see it move.  Phoenix’s real beauty lies in her graceful motion, which is some of the most convincing and eerily lifelike that we’ve seen in a robot that uses standard hobby servos and a common off-the-shelf servo controller.  The kinematics are computed by an intricately programmed spreadsheet, which we highly recommend you check out if you’re a fan of trigonometry.

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We want to thank everyone for their great submissions.  If all goes as planned, the next contest (which is already underway) will conclude at the end of May 2008.  You can stay up to date on contest rules and regulations at the Trossen Robotics Project Contest page, and start posting your projects in our Project Showcase Forum.

Last month's issue of Discover Magazine featured the "Top 100 Science Stories of 2007," a look back at some of last year's important discoveries, developments, and advancements in scientific fields.  Not surprisingly, a few of these stories were robotics-related; and one that I found particularly fascinating was titled "Robots Evolve and Learn How to Lie."  In a swarm of robots, whose behavioral software was evolved by successive generations of natural selection, the tendency to deceive others for personal gain arose naturally in some of the robots.  Of course, if this were the predominant outcome of natural selection, the species would fail.  Thus, it's also interesting to note that altruism developed as well, allowing the swarm as a whole to survive.

Though it wasn't mentioned explicitly in the article, a little digging revealed that this experiment was carried out by the team that developed the "Swarmbot" and "Swarmanoid" projects.

Check out Discover.  For a limited time, their online archive of articles (from 1992 up to the current news stand issue) is available for free, no subscription or registration necessary.  Regardless, I urge you to pay for a subscription.  It's a fine publication.

[Edit:] Found another article about this from New Scientist, with a few more details:

"Robot swarms ‘evolve’ effective communication"

Ok, this is pretty sweet.  With the soon-to-be-released Robodance 4 software, not only will you be able to control an i-SOBOT from your computer, you’ll be able to control this awesome little humanoid with a Nintendo Wii controller!  You can even set up Robodance so that i-SOBOT mimics gestures made with the Wiimote.  You’ll need a Bluetooth adapter to talk to the Wiimote and a USB-UIRT to send commands to the i-SOBOT, and then you’re in business.  Be sure to sign up for the Robodance mailing list, so you’ll be informed as soon as Version 4 is released to the public.

[Edit]  Just to clear up any confusion, here’s what’s actually going on: The Wii controller sends your input to a computer via Bluetooth, Robodance translates the controller input to i-SOBOT commands, then the UIRT broadcasts these commands to the i-SOBOT in the form of IR pulses.  I can’t wait to try this out, since it sounds a heck of a lot easier than remembering all the button combinations necessary to operate I-SOBOT from its stock controller.

Found via Engadget.

No keyboard or mouse needed! Teach your robot what to do by using motions and gestures.

Skilligent is taking a new approach to the area of human robot interactions, their press release explains:

Skilligent Robot Learning and Behavior Control System is a software product which enables robots to learn procedures and skills directly from human users. The product is a set of software components specifically designed for straightforward integration into control loops of PC-controlled robots.

The software needs to be integrated with sensors, motors, actuators and robot’s control system via a set of open APIs. On one side, the software controls every motion of the robot. On the other side, the software uses a video camera, a microphone and other sensors to receive guidance from a human user.

The software analyzes human’s gestures, looks at the objects presented by the user, listens to the sounds and tries to guess what robot is supposed to do.

Through trial and error, the robot understands what needs to be done and associates learned behaviors with stimuli used by the human. Over a few training sessions, the robot refines its understanding of the domain, the procedures and skills required to serve the user.

Robot Learning Technology is especially useful in the following domains:
1. Industrial/service robots for small and medium sized businesses
2. Defense and law enforcement
3. Health-care and Elder-care robots
4. Research and Education robotics

Skilligent is currently seeking partnerships for further sales and distribution of their software packages. Interested parties can contact them through their website.

Skilligent LLC is headquartered in Dallas, Texas and operates an off-shore research and development center.

http://www.skilligent.com

Michael Somby has done an great job at breaking down some of the top Robotics Software Platforms into short and sweet overviews in his article, “A Review of Robotics Software Platforms“. There are still some that he hasn’t had the chance to fully review (but he still provides some good resources for), but this will definitely help those (including myself) who like to get the question “Yes, but what is it?” answered quickly without having to read through 80 pages of documentation. He touched base on Evolution Robotics ERSP, Microsoft Robotics Studio, OROCOS, Skilligent, URBI, Webots, Player, Stage, Gazebo, iRobot AWARE, OpenJAUS, CLARAty.

Visuals are always nice to give a little taste, so here’s a table that I grabbed from Michael’s article:

Read the article!

Ever wonder how you would go about hacking into Nintendo’s Wiimote, and start using it in any of your .NET applications? Thanks to Brian Peek, we can now have an easy-to-use managed API for the wiimote for use in all of our .NET applications! Tie this together with some servo controllers and possibly a couple of DC motor controllers, or just use the all-in-one wireless Serializer Robot Controller board and you have some pretty wicked possibilities! I can’t wait to see what kind of insane motion sequences roboticists make with this:)

via (Coding4Fun)
He provides the full source along with a sample application on how to use the API.

Well, what does the API actually support? The classic controller, the state of the IR and acceleration, button state, battery, rumble, is the nunchuk attatched and what it is doing. The only thing that appears not to be currently supported is the speaker.

Check out Brian’s blog for updates to the library.

Ever wonder how to measure a vehicle’s performance using an accelerometer in a high level programming language? Well, Mike Harkabus has just put together a nice tutorial (with source) on Microsoft’s Coding4Fun Blog that explains how to do so. Called iAccelerate, “using basic physics equations, we can derive a vehicle’s current speed, distance traveled, horsepower, and other performance metrics from the acceleration of the vehicle”, all of which is written in Visual C# Express.

Since the Express languages are free, you can put this entire project together all for the price of the accelerometer (given that you have a vehicle to test and a laptop of course). The accelerometer used in this this tutorial is the Phidget 2-axis accelerometer, which happens to be under $70.

Thanks to the hard work of 20 developers, there is an open source vision library, freely available to the public, named OpenCV.

This library is mainly aimed at real time computer vision. Some example areas would be Human-Computer Interaction (HCI); Object Identification, Segmentation and Recognition; Face Recognition; Gesture Recognition; Motion Tracking, Ego Motion, Motion Understanding; Structure From Motion (SFM); and Mobile Robotics.

Wondering about some credentials and how well this software works? OpenCV was used as the vision system of “Stanley”, the winning entry to the $2M DARPA Grand Challenge race of 2005.

Wondering what kind of a support community is out there for a vision library of such a caliber? There is a Yahoo Tech Group currently with 23,804 members who are contributing to this library’s success. If your interested in being a part of this community, join this group and find more out about this library and what you need to do to get started with implementing it in your own projects.

Convinced? I thought so. The library can be downloaded at the OpenCV Sourceforge Page, where more information can be found about the library as well.

via Intel

PCI nDepthâ„¢ Vision System
Overview

Focus Robotics nDepthâ„¢ PCI vision system is for companies and individuals looking to add real-time depth perception to an existing PC platform. Operating at 30 frames per second for 752×480 images, the PCI nDepth” vision system provides outstanding depth performance for demanding applications such as mobile robot navigation, people tracking, gesture recognition, targeting, 3D surface visualization and advanced human computer interaction.

Visit the Focus Robotics site 

We posted about another USB missile launcher before and ruminated about someone making a viaion tracking device with one. Well RoboRealm has gone and done just that with a different USB Missile Launcher! They have a whole tutorial posted about it here for people who want to do it themselves.
Link