Blogs

The AGAI participated in various activities at this year's HRI conference. Annika Peters took part in the Pioneers Workshop which she found an excellent opportunity for networking. Moreover, we (Manja Lohse and Britta Wrede) organized the workshop on "The role of expectations in intuitive HRI" together with Verena Hafner, Yukie Nagai, and Joachim Meyer. The workshop raised a lot of interest and many researchers from various fields attended it. For some material and the proceedings please visit the workshop website.

One of least known, but most important, aspects of the ActiveMemory is its support for indexes. The first, but actually less important, reason to use indexes is performance: As in conventional databases, indexes are essential for good performance. Due to the simple nature of the XPath expressions used in AM queries, performance is still OK without them, particularly when the Memory has only a few entries -- as is usually the case when people test their components, so this often goes unnoticed.

However, the more important reason to use indexes is that, without indexes, deadlock potential is much higher.

For a couple of years now, general-purpose computation on the gpu (GPGPU) has been all the rage to get the last bit of performance for many data-intensive algorithms, including computer vision on the gpu. Claims of 100-fold speed-ups are not unheard of and 10-fold is pretty common. Now, a couple of researchers from Intel have published a

Most current mobile robots use a laser scanner for building maps and these things cost serious money. Therefore, when Neato built a laser scanner into a vacuum for <400$ and claimed the scanner cost less than <30$ many people became interested very fast.

Yesterday, Willow Garage officially celebrated the start of their PR2 beta program, where they lend PR2 robots to eleven (11) institutions, ten of which are universities, with the eleventh going to Bosch. After the usual speechs, the PR2s made their entrance, where they were being led by the hand (i.e. physical HRI) by the Willow Garage team.

Do you want a small robot for your home? Yes, was the answer of Francisco Paz from Spain. He developed Qbo, a small open-source robot with stereo-vision, speech recognition and synthesis and control over wifi. The robot looks a bit like an egg, but if it is cheap, it would be something on my list for the next birthday :)
http://www.golem.de/1005/75357.html
http://thecorpora.com/blog/?p=75

I'm currently visiting Willow Garage and a big reason for that is discussion about the design ideas behind ROS, the Robot Operating System, which has been initiated here. ROS has two parts: A core, which provides naming and messaging, and a large and growing number of extension modules for various typical functions such as navigation, control, etc.

Christian just pointed out to me that PtGrey's most recent newsletter has a nice intro to the upcoming USB 3.0 interface standard for cameras. Towards the end there is also a nice comparison to the various other interfaces with a good view of pros and cons.

There is an interesting computer vision book online:
Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications written by Richard Szeliski.

The book is only a draft at the moment, but you can find many interesting stuff in there. It will be published by Springer late in 2010.

OpenCV, the open-source computer vision library originally sponsored by Intel and now by Willow Garage, has been adding functionality at an amazing pace for the past 18 months or so. Much of the new functionality plugs holes that are particularly interesting for robotics, e.g. the new stereo pipeline, or adressing developer usabillity (e.g. the C++ and Python APIs).