Interesting News

The PR2 Plays Pool

Submitted by Anthony on June 15, 2010 - 8:24pm.

With only a small team of developers and a week's worth of development, the PR2 can now play pool! The "Poolshark" team started last Monday and began making shots on Friday. The PR2 won't be hustling you in pool halls anytime soon, but it pocketed five shots on Friday before the team decided it was time to celebrate.

The Poolshark team dealt with numerous technical challenges throughout the week: engineering a special grip and bridge so the PR2 could hold the cue, a ball detector, table localization, visualizations and input tools, shot selector, and more.

A big thanks goes to Alon Altman for his open-source FastFiz billiards library. FastFiz is a physics and rules engine for billiards that the Poolshark team used to select which shots the PR2 should take. The Poolshark team has released its own code in the billiards stack.

June is "Hackathon" month, so there are two more one-week hackathons to come: pushing a cart and fetching a drink from a refrigerator. It's one down, two to go!

Previous "hackathon" sprints:

The NHK’s Millimeter-Wave TV Camera Can See Objects Through Walls

Submitted by Anthony on June 11, 2010 - 9:20am.

NHK Millimeter-Wave TV Camera (Image courtesy NHK)
By Andrew Liszewski

The NHK, the Japanese public broadcaster, has always been an innovator when it comes to television technologies. I mean you can basically thank them for ‘inventing’ HDTV. But this time around they’ve been showing off a new Millimeter-wave technology camera at their 80th annual Open House that can actually see through walls.

The camera works a bit like radar, sending out 60GHz millimeter radio waves (the same kind used in modern airport full-body security scanners) and then capturing the reflected waves using a high-speed beam scanning antenna to produce a 2D image. By analyzing the propagation delay of the reflected waves, which essentially provides depth information about what’s being shot, the system can be tuned to ignore obstacles in front of or behind the subject, as is demonstrated in the video below where the camera ’sees’ a pair of moving mannequins behind a piece of plywood.

According to the NHK, practical applications of the technology include news crews being able to film through smoke during an emergency, but hopefully they’re inclined to license it out to emergency rescue personnel as well.

[ NHK Open House 2010 - Millimeter-wave TV Camera ] VIA [ DigInfo & The Red Ferret Journal ]

Synchonized/mated quadcopters

Submitted by Anthony on June 7, 2010 - 3:50pm.

From BotJunkie:

"Quadrotors are getting smarter and more talented, but besides surveillance, their usefulness is a bit limited due to their size. Where one little helicopter fails, however, an assemblage of little helicopters might be able to succeed. The Distributed Flight Array is a project from the Institute of Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zurich that aims to combine a bunch of different little autonomous helicopters into a big glob of autonomous helicopters. Each helicopter unit has its own motor, computer, and sensors, and can wirelessly communicate with all the other units. In addition to flying, they also have little motorized wheels underneath to let them crawl around the ground.

There are all kinds of ways in which a distributed flight array could be useful. One of the most obvious is heavy lifting… Got something heavy? Call in a bunch of robots to combine and lift it. Got something heavier? Call in a bunch more. If one robot breaks, it’s not a big deal, since you can just swap in another one. The robots are even able to adapt on the fly to keep the entire array stable, so adding and removing individual robots is relatively straightforward. Still, getting the robots to reliably dock with each other in mid air is probably easier said than done… We’ll definite be looking forward to seeing some video of that in action."

[ DFA ]

NPR makes source code for Android app public

Submitted by Anthony on June 3, 2010 - 10:36pm.

NPR (National Public Radio) has just issued a press release announcing that they have made the source code for their Android application public. For those who have never heard of public radio (shame on you), it is a member supported radio service providing (usually) unslanted news coverage, classical music, and entertaining programs such as the Car Talk and This American Life. Google it. You won’t look back.

With the release of the application’s source code, NPR is hoping Android community programmers, in conjunction with Google developer Michael Frederick, will contribute cool new code that will make this app better. Not a programmer? NPR still wants to hear from you, as they believe user ideas are key to building innovative new functionalities.

So, all you programmers interested in helping create a truly wonderful public radio application as well as you Android users who simply want to share a brilliant idea you have, Tweet at NPR’s Android Twitter account (@nprandroid) for more details. Full text of the press release can be found below.

Show Press Release

Some ideas take on a life of their own. They grow and evolve beyond expectations.

It’s almost organic.

Since its bazaar beginning, NPR’s Android app has been an experiment, allowing NPR to test the waters of collaborating with the open source community.

We didn’t know how fast the Android platform would grow or what kind of an impact it would make. The last six months show us Android’s incredible trajectory and that our audience gravitates toward that momentum. Since the app’s release in December, we’ve seen astounding growth, and now over 100,000 people use this new platform each month.

In the spirit of the Android operating system, we’ve decided to make the code for NPR’s app public. We believe this matches perfectly with NPR’s public service mission. Public media implies our audiences have a stake in our product, and open source projects are a means to better connect to our stakeholders.

We want to connect with you.

If you are a programmer, you know what this is all about. If you find yourself spending your free time hacking up cool things just because it is your passion, then put your energy to a noble cause. Spend some time poking around our app. Not only are you helping NPR and your local member station, but you will get a chance to work with a developer at Google, Michael Frederick. Michael has been responsible for the majority of work in building the NPR Android app and is ready to engage with anyone contributing code to the project. Thanks to Michael’s generosity this project is off to strong start. But we don’t want it to stop there.

If you don’t spend your free time digging through the guts of your latest attempt at artificial intelligence, you can still be a part of this community, because no matter who you are, you can still have good ideas.

We need to hear from you. If you love NPR and believe in what public media stands for, join us. The more the better. Come talk to us on Twitter @nprandroid or wherever you engage with NPR.

New to Android? Get the basics at Droid App Showcase