Friday 31 August 2007

Devantech Drivers for MSRS 1.5

After an excesive delay, I have finally put up the Devantech drivers for MSRS 1.5 on CodePlex at http://www.codeplex.com/DevantechMSRS.

Not many code changes, just a lot of cleaning up the code and making it live in /Apps instead of /Samples/Platforms so as to keep it seperate from the other MS samples.

One interesting change was made to SonarPan, so that it can deal with multiple sonars, or pretend sonars, take the initial pose presented by the Generic Sonar contract and alter it on the fly relative to the servo that controls the panning and pass this on to any consuming service. This was done, so that my SLAM services can accept the now well-posed sonar readings and chuck them straight into the maps.

I've also put up all my SLAM code to codeplex and will move it out of setup mode in the next couple of weeks. The basic algorythm and test app work fine, but a fair ammount of work is still needed to make the MSRS service which wraps the DLL a pleasure to use. So far I've tested it with the traxster's IR using the DLL, and can get nice non-slam maps from the simulator with the Pioneer's laser.

I have a heavy workload for the near future, so won't be able to devote much time to continuing this - If you think you might be interested in helping complete porting the SLAM to MSRS, please get in touch.

Thursday 23 August 2007

Kuka Educational Framework

Kuka has released a very thorough collection of tutorials about controlling their industrial robotic arm using MSRS.

It covers many real-world robotics subjects including: forward and inverse kinematics of articulated chains, syncronized velocity / acceleration control, sensor feedback, mobile platforms and task excecution architectures.

This is probably the most advanced collection of services for MSRS so far, complete with clear, detailed documentation. Well done Kuka.

Tuesday 14 August 2007

Aldebaran's Nao selected for Robocup Standard League

As reported on the Robocup 4 legged league site, the Nao has been selected for the Standard League Robocup 2008 humanoid football competition. I look forward to watching it!

And for full disclosure, I can now happily say that I have taken work with Aldebaran and hope to play a part in bringing the Nao to next years games. May the fun begin...