･DARwIn-LC Virginia Tech’s RoMeLa unveiled a cute new robot at RoboCup 2010 in Singapore. It’s called DARwIn-LC (Low Cost) and was featured on a poster near the Robotis Bioloid booth with the headline “Open Platform Humanoid Robot”. It sports 20 degrees of freedom actuated by Robotis AX-18F (18kg/cm torque) servos. Thanks to an NSF grant, the robot will be manufactured along with its sibling, DARwIn-HP (High Performance), to be distributed to 11 of Virginia Tech’s partner universities, and may even be available through Robotis itself. This is pretty exciting to see, and the following video shows it’s no slouch when it comes to standard humanoid behaviors. Video (Mirror): I think they really nailed the design of this one. [source: I, Bioloid] Update June 30th 2010: Dr. We want to form a community of DARwIn-LC users to share new ideas for improvement, hack it, etc. and use the robot for research, education, outreach, and of course, an easy entry point for the RoboCup humanoid division. Media:
AR Glasses by Optinvent Aldebaran Launches NAO Next Gen Aldebaran Robotics has launched NAO Next Gen, a new version of a robot used by universities around the world. Aside from some new colors, NAO Next Gen doesn’t look any different from the previous version, but boasts upgraded performance in key areas. The new 1.6GHz Intel processor can handle two HD video streams simultaneously, allowing it to recognize objects and faces faster. New speech recognition software (called Nuance) can sift out the most important words in a spoken sentence to produce more accurate responses. Video : We’re not sure how this will affect existing NAO developers. The upgraded performance is nice, but after several years of development and increasing competition from the likes of the Robotis DARwIn-OP , we expected a new version to be a more dramatic overhaul. [source: Aldebaran Robotics ]
Air Box Lab - Air & Life Quality | L’avenir de la programmation (2/6) : La programmation pour les non-programmeurs Par Rémi Sussan le 24/05/11 | 10 commentaires | 13,345 lectures | Impression Programmer, c’est difficile : penser logiquement, par étapes, sans en sauter aucune et en envisageant toutes les possibilités de ses actions demande une grande attention, une grande rigueur. Mais à ces complications s’ajoute encore l’apprentissage d’une syntaxe extrêmement ardue, qui ne supporte pas la moindre faute, à la virgule près. Sans compter que ladite syntaxe nous prend à rebrousse-poil. La simple instruction A=A+1, que l’on trouve dans presque tous les langages informatiques, y compris le vieux Basic, pourtant censé s’adresser aux néophytes, semble une insulte à ce que nous connaissons des mathématiques depuis l’école primaire. On a déjà eu du mal à avaler les maths, faudrait-il maintenant les jeter aux orties ? Un autre obstacle, peut-être moins évident, est l’absence de résultats immédiatement gratifiants pour les débutants. Les langages visuels Les enfants du Smalltalk Rémi Sussan
Twelve Monkeys Company SkyCall quadcopter by MIT Senseable City Lab Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have built a flying robot that can guide people around complex urban environments or aid search-and-rescue missions, in an attempt to show that drones can perform useful tasks as well as sinister ones (+ movie). The SkyCall quadcopter, designed by research group Senseable City Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, acts like an electronic flying guide dog, hovering just ahead of the user and guiding them to their destination. Yaniv Jacob Turgeman, research and development lead at Senseable City Lab, said SkyCall was designed to counter the sinister reputation of drones, and show they can be useful. "Our imaginations of flying sentient vehicles are filled with dystopian notions of surveillance and control, but this technology should be tasked with optimism," he told Dezeen. A prototype of the SkyCall quadcopter has already been used on test missions to guide students around the MIT campus in Cambridge, USA. Development Future