10 minute robot update

Moving house and thesis writing means I haven't had any time to work on my 3D scanning robot lately. Anyway, here's a video I put on YouTube almost 2 weeks ago of some 1dof movement with 3D visualisation in processing. The communication is done via serial.

Soapbox Seminar

I've been invited to give a talk at the Soap Box seminar series in University of Bristol's School of Geographical Sciences on 3rd Feb.

Here's the blurb:

Non-industrial robotics is a highly multidisciplinary branch of research which has the ability to catch public attention, mainly due to science fiction examples of advanced, thinking machines. But how do real robots compare to the popular concept? In this talk I shall be introducing the field of robotics by presenting some examples of the current state of the art. I'm also hoping to provide some food for thought, via the possible implications of robots in future society and the perceptions of robots by humans.

Though the talk is an introduction to robots in general, due to some email miscommunication my talk has ended up being titled 'Why robots probably won't take over the world!'

Everyone is welcome to attend.

Haptics Demo Video

Haptics is quite a difficult thing to describe to people without actually getting them to try out a system. This video was created to aid a talk on telehaptics, with the intention of showing the relationship between a haptic device (in the real world) and a simulated tactile and graphic object (in a virtual world).

The device is a Novint Falcon and the simulation is a demo from Chai 3D. I filmed the falcon while running the simulation and took a screen capture of the whole thing. An artifact of this was the horizontal compression.



Of course, a video will never beat getting someone's hands on a real device, but it should help the explanation.