My Weblog
This is a place for me to post interesting snippets or complete random things about life, my research, AI, robotics and everything else. Have fun and leave a comment!
Vision-eering
February 19, 2012
Recently I have been working a lot on trying to make the iCub see things. A fully integrated computer vision or robotic vision system is a quite tricky mathematical and engineering problem. Here at IDSIA we were trying to develop an easy to use system that would allow to rapid prototyping (offline) vision modules for the iCub, mainly to detect and localise objects the robot is in later stages supposed to manipulate and interact with.
Finally a new Laptop Bag
January 11, 2012
On a different note I finally got a new laptop bag :)
After 5 years with my old bag, I decided to cover my new MacBookPro with a new bag as well. My old one I got in 2007 just after moving to Lisbon to work at IST. It was less then 20 euro at the local FNAC at that time and it survived until now (though with some scraps :).
European Robotics Week and IDSIA Robotics
November 30, 2011
This year's European Robotics Week sponsored by the EU though one of its Framework Programmes (EUnited Robotics) is currently underway and there is a lot of things to see and do. Labs offering demos and presentations as well as hands-on workshops about the on-going robotics research in Europe. A new webpage www.robotics-labs.eu was started where one can check out the various labs and for some of them even be able to see live webcam feeds.
For IDSIA we did not get a webcam, but we nevertheless uploaded a movie about us and our current activities. Enjoy the film after the jump.
So, you want to build a satellite?
September 26, 2011
The MAVEN Team at Goddard has put up some videos to show what it takes to build a satellite. Those short animated movies are a quick look into all the work it takes to make a space mission work. NASA seems to do it not much more different than ESA does *smile* The videos are after the jump.
Summer School 2011
September 21, 2011
Also this year I had the chance to attend a summer school, after ISRIS in 2009 and 2010 school at JAIST, I was going to this year's Hands On Summer School on Neural Dynamics Approaches to Cognitive Robotics in Guimaraes, Portugal.
This school focused on the idea of Dynamic Neural Fields (similar but according to the presentations more powerful than Neural Network approaches) and how to use them in various robotic systems. The presentations, mainly given by researchers from the University of Bochum and Minho, ranged from computer science to neuroscience and included various applications, such as on mobile and humanoid robots (including the Nao and ARoS, a humanoid (upper body) robot built at Minho). The school ended with a project to be implemented (and yes there is a video of ARoS after the jump).
What the iCub Does During Holidays
August 31, 2011
Leo here at IDSIA has been working on a really nifty nice demo of what you can do with the iCub simulator, if you are willing to get your hands dirty and go into the code. The following video shows the outcome.
Some Coding
August 31, 2011
Finally I wanna put some info online about what I actually do here at IDSIA. Right now I am mainly working on the iCub robot and I am currently looking into some computer vision related problems, like image segmentation and object detection (for object manipulation later on). Here is a small teaser of what we are currently working on....
Broken Shoulder
July 14, 2011
The iCub's shoulder, how it should not look
So the last two days we had the IM-CLeVeR Review Meeting here in Lugano and I helped showing some of the demos to the roughly 50 people involved in the project. As usual with robotics demonstration everything that could went wrong, and while reseting the software and homing the iCub, its shoulder decided to pop, as you can see on the picture.
ACE/YARP on Mac – The Easy Way
July 10, 2011
Good news everyone!
Paul Fitzpatrick just posted this on the robotcub hackers list, a very quick and easy way to install ACE and YARP on OSX:
iCub Sim – MBP Setup Pt. 3
May 17, 2011
This is part three in the odyssey of setting up of my new MacBook Pro 13", needed for the projects I am involved with here at IDSIA. Maybe somebody else is using similar software so here is how I setup the following libraries and tools on Snow Leopard: XCode, OpenGL(is part of OSX/XCode), Git, CMake, ACE, YARP, QT, OpenCV, ODE, BulletPhysics, and SDL. In the end I also installed pyBrain (with scipy and numpy). (Part 1 is here, and here is part 2)