Archive for December, 2007

Willow Garage - Personal Robots Program

Published by Michael Aivaliotis on December 20, 2007 in Robo Development 2007 and Robotics. 1 Comment

Keenan Wyrobek from Stanford University is working closely with Willow Garage to continue the development work he and Eric Berger started while in their graduate studies at Stanford University. He shows off PR1 and explains the goals of the Personal Robotics Program and the next generation, PR2. Via Stanford University Website:

Kenneth Salisbury, a professor of Computer Science and of Surgery leads the Personal Robotics Program at Stanford with CS Assistant Professor Andrew Ng in coordination with the department’s STAIR project. After about 18 months of work, they have developed a first prototype. It is remotely controlled now (eventually it will become more autonomous) but it is an early milestone on the way to releasing a practical, affordable and complete robotics platform.

See also: CNET Article

LabVIEW replaces vehicle ECU - University of Waterloo

Published by Michael Aivaliotis on December 13, 2007 in NIWeek 2007, embedded and labview. 0 Comments

Stephen Litt, a systems design engineering student from the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) shows us how he and three other students replaced a vehicle ECU with a CompactRIO module running LabVIEW Real-Time. What started as a fourth year design project has now turned into a start-up company called WaterlooSPEED. The team documents their efforts on their blog, and in this post, describe how they have the system controllable via a PDA! Now that’s cool.

Steve Hassenplug - Mindstorms NXT holonomic drive robot.

Published by Michael Aivaliotis on December 6, 2007 in NIWeek 2007 and mindstorms nxt. 0 Comments

Steve Hassenplug was there from the beginning when Lego decided to revamp the old RCX platform. He was part of the Mindstorms User Panel (MUP) which was extensively covered in a Feb 2006 Wired magazine article. He was later invited to participate in the Mindstorm Developer Program (MDP) where he built a holonomic drive robot called Omni. This latest version which he shows off in the video uses a compass sensor to keep on track to it’s destination.