Archive for October, 2007

Allmotion Inc. Motion Controllers

Published by Michael Aivaliotis on October 31, 2007 in Robo Development 2007 and Robotics. 0 Comments




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Interview with the president of Allmotion Inc. AllMotion manufactures Stepper Drives, Stepper Controllers, Servo Drives and Servo Controllers. These are the most compact Intelligent Stepper Motor Drives and Stepper Motor Controllers on the market today.

RoboDevelopment Conference

Published by Michael Aivaliotis on October 26, 2007 in Robo Development 2007 and Robotics. 0 Comments

Just came back from an exciting day at the first RoboDevelopment Conference in San Jose. From their website:

Join the international robotics community at RoboDevelopment Conference and Exposition, the first robotics industry event focused on the design and development of commercially viable personal, service and intelligent mobile robotics products - products that are to be used outside of laboratory environments and sold at a profit.

Ok, so if there are ever going to be robots interacting with us in our daily lives, then the first place to see these would be at this conference. It wasn’t about industrial robotics but about how we can bring robots into the homes and interact with them. Not only that, but how we can do this for under $200. I saw a lot of cool stuff. I took a lot of video and in general, came away with a lot of hope for the future.

Up until now there hasn’t been a conference of this kind. The location of the conference is telling to the goals of the organizer, Dana Kara, the president of Robotics Trends. In the past, most robotics conferences have been held in cities such as Boston or Pittsburgh because they are close to certain universities or military research in the field. But now, Robotics Trends is hoping to bring the field of robotics development for commercial products closure to venture capitalists looking for new entrepreneurial fields to invest in.

I will be presenting video in the upcoming weeks but for now, here are some highlights.

    Coroware displayed a demo of Corobot. A versatile robot development platform.
    Ray Almgren from National Instruments presented at the keynote and gave an overview of his company’s involvement in the robotics industry. One example was the partnership with Lego in helping develop the Mindstorms NXT product.

As you can appreciate. There is a lot of stuff to see. Unfortunately I only had time for one day (out of a 2-day conference), plus I had to do all the video interviews so I didn’t get a chance to see any of the presentations. There were several tracks with many in-depth sessions where the technology experts were presenting the tools of the trade to allow more companies to develop lower cost robots.

In the end, If it ever happened again, I would definitely be back. This time with more time to spare.

Automated Rubik’s Cube Solver

Published by Michael Aivaliotis on October 24, 2007 in NIWeek 2007. 0 Comments


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There’s been some activity over the past year or so where people have been trying to create automated machines to solve the Rubik’s cube. At NIWeek 2007 which took place this past August, I had the chance to interview an applications engineer from National Instruments who described the system they put together to achieve this goal. As you can see from this video, the process is very involved. It requires imaging of the faces, processing the solution and executing the moves to produce the final completed cube. The hardware is expensive, the mechanics problematic and in the end, the demo fails to do the job. On the other hand, it’s a cool way to spend some time with some motion control hardware.Most of the time, the best solution to something is the one that is the simplest. Take a look at this Rubik’s cube automated solution that uses Mindstorms NXT. I am scared to see the budget difference between the two implementations. Daniele Benedettelli’s website provides more insight into how this was done. As you can see, the main problem of how to grip and rotate the side has been solved by using a socket type construction that wraps around all the cubes. This way, the stress of rotation is evenly distributed.

Dean Kamen: New prosthetic arm for veterans

Published by Michael Aivaliotis on October 23, 2007 in Robotics. 0 Comments

Dean Kamen speaking at NIWeek 2006I’m going to inaugurate this blog with a post about an amazing man, Dean Kamen. The first time I had a chance to see him speak in person was at the 2006 NIWeek conference. He spoke of the process of invention and the ideas of some in upper management that think that invention and creativity is something that can be “managed” and has a predictable life cycle.

I found his talk enlightening because it gave some insight into the mind of a man that is truly an innovator of our times. Here are just two of the many slides he presented.

 

The dark night of the innovator.

Innovation development schedule

It’s possible that at the same time he gave this presentation, Dean was already working on his next innovation. Dean spoke at the TED conference and presented this preview of an extraordinary prosthetic arm at the request of the US Department of Defense.

This video clip taken at TED shows Dean explaining how he came around to eventually accepting the DOD challenge. It shows how empathetic Dean is to the human spirit and how he’s trying to help ease some of the suffering these soldiers are going through. In the world of robotics, the requirements imposed on the development of this prosthetic arm were an extreme challenge. The final demonstration in this video makes it look so easy.