VI Shots

This video is the first in a series of videos I will be releasing over the next couple of months related to my trip to Atlanta for the 2008 FIRST Robotic Championship. I took a lot of video there and I don’t want it to sit on my hard drive. Instead, I want to make sure the enthusiasm, excitement and craziness of the competition is shown so that new mentors can be motivated to help the next generation of engineers and scientists waiting in the wings.

I always do what Google tells me to do. A few weeks ago my Google reader suggested that I should follow the robotgrrl blog RSS feed. So I did. This blog is about robotics from a Montreal, Canada High School girls point of view. Erin loves robots. So much so that she applied to the Stanford University EPGY summer program – Artificial Intelligence. After she got accepted, she announced that funding for her tuition would come from the sale of styrobots. These are little hand made robots that combine vibrobot “technology”, painted Styrofoam cups and a cute name. Erin is selling these on Etsy. Erin is heading for the final stretch deadline to collect $1200 before June 13th. You can help. Go to her site and donate to a good cause. Not sure if Erin will make any more Styrobots for her Etsy shop but keep checking there. After the recent exposure she got on dvice, I don’t think she will be able to keep up with demand. Watch the video to see what a Styrobot looks like.

We were the first to blog about Slashbot back in March. Now, Slashbot is Internet famous after it was featured on Engadget. It now has 177K+ hits on Youtube. A record for any video featuring LabVIEW or NI technology. I like the fact that it uses solenoids to hit the guitar buttons. This means it could possibly be retrofitted to attach to a humanoid robot that holds the guitar. That would look kinda neat. I contacted Michael Voth and it seems that this demo will be making an appearance at NIWeek 2008. I promise to bring back a video interview of this cool project.

Boston Engineering decided to demonstrate their FlexStack product by attaching it to an iRobot Create programmable robot, have it scan RFID tags and then make it do several dances. FlexStack is powered by LabVIEW Embedded. Take a look at this original VI Shots video.

Another video taken at the FIRST final competition of 2008 in Atlanta. NI built a robot called NITRO to demonstrate the powerful capabilities of the new cRIO controller that will be used by the competition teams this year.

In addition to a cool ball shooting mode, NITRO has some advanced image analysis capabilities. Here we see it doing some pattern recognition and executing autonomous moves based on the image viewed.

What is not shown in the video is the ability to execute a specific move just by drawing a series of segmented lines in the provided dashboard application and then transmitting them to the bot. A huge improvement over last year.

The ability of the teams to take advantage of the power of LabVIEW graphical programming is really going to be an asset.

Resources:
• Link to quicktime version of video
• Additional video of NITRO

In this video taken at Robo Business 2008, Jim Lynch gives us an overview of the latest iRobot robot called the Looj.
Resources:

• Download Video
• Looj product page on iRobot

This video highlights the new Compact RIO hardware that will be used as the controller for the 2009 FIRST robotics competition in the FRC category.

National Instruments had a booth close to the pits at the 2008 FRC final championship in Atlanta. They built several robots demonstrating the capabilities of the new controller. One of the robots is shown here and the various components of the control hardware are explained.

Resources:

• Download Video

Out of the many submissions to the NIWeek 2008 demo contest, this year we have yet another console game meets LabVIEW. Texas A&M students: Dave Buckner, Mitchell Jefferis, Vinny LaPenna, and Michael Voth are working on Slashbot.

From their blog:

To put it simply, we are designing a robot that is capable of autonomously playing a video game, the wildly popular Guitar Hero series. In the game a player attempts to simulate playing songs as color-coded buttons corresponding to notes scroll on the screen. A sensing and computation system will analyze the NTSC video signal as it is output from a PlayStation2 gaming system. The buttons a player is asked to press will be detected and an appropriate control signal will be sent to the robot. The robot will consist of six solenoid actuators, one for each colored button and one for the “strum” bar.

Resources mentioned:

• Slashbot Blog
• NIWeek 2008
• Texas A&M University

Anybots just released a new video of the next version of Dexter. Dexter is a biped teleoperated robot created by the Mountain View, CA based company.

Dexter’s walking is performed autonomously and is a demonstration of the type of hybrid robot that Anybots is working on. It will mainly be teleoperated but certain tasks will be automated such as walking.

Here’s a VI Shots video of the Anybots team during last years Robodevelopment conference:

Addition resources:

• Anybots
• Dexter’s first steps
• Download Video
• Trevor Blackwell
• Paul Graham writes about Dexter

NXT-G Online is software that allows you to program a virtual Lego Mindstorms NXT. Are you a school that doesn’t have enough cash for an NXT hardware set. No fear, this virtual software actually lets you program in NXT-G and download to a virtual NXT brain. Then you can execute the code and see it in virtual action.

To help better understand what is going on in the video, here is the sequence of chronologically events:

• A challenge was selected – a video that came up introduced the challenge.
• The simulated NXT-G programming environment was opened
• Wrote some code (4 motor blocks were dragged onto the palette, and each was set at a different power level).
• Downloaded the NXT-G program to the virtual NXT robot, which automatically opened the virtual environment.
• The robot was moved to where we wanted it to start.
• The virtual NXT brick was opened and we ran the program that was just created. The robot moved accordingly.

Note that the release version of NXT-G Online also has the ability select different sensors and motors for the virtual robot after which you can go back and change your code to make use of your modifications.

Source: The NXT STEP – LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Blog