TBGL - Support not available from Petr [16.9/2010 - 18.9/2010]

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi guys!,

I would like to report that I might not be able to provide support for TBGL during the 16.9 - 18.9 (not sure if internet access will be available).

Why? I will be speaker on robotics conference(:lol:) "Robotics in Education 2010 (http://rie2010.stuba.sk/)", presenting the precomputed scan matching technique on the GPU.
It is the approach I first developed using ThinBASIC and OpenCL (bringing 40x speed boost even with low end GPU), and I will also underline that fact during the speech, so it could raise some interest in ThinBASIC hopefully. There will be some ThinBASIC TBGL renderings shown as well.


Have a nice time here!,
Petr

[LanceGary]

Hi guys!,

I would like to report that I might not be able to provide support for TBGL during the 16.9 - 18.9.

Why? I will be speaker on robotics conference(:lol:) "Robotics in Education 2010 (http://rie2010.stuba.sk/)", presenting the precomputed scan matching technique on the GPU.
It is the approach I first developed using ThinBASIC and OpenCL (bringing 40x speed boost even with low end GPU), and I will also underline that fact during the speech, so it could raise some interest in ThinBASIC hopefully. There will be some ThinBASIC TBGL renderings shown as well.


Have a nice time here!,
Petr


Couldn't you be replaced at the conference by a Robot? :-)

Lance

[Petr Schreiber]

I am afraid after my performance, everyone will agree the robot would be better choice :lol:


Petr

[Charles Pegge]

I hope your presentation is well received Petr. Bratislava looks like a great venue. My friends enjoyed their visit to this city a few years ago. It has a vibrant arts scene.

Now if you made a perfect robotic replica of yourself, would there be quantum entanglement - so you could in effect be in two places at the same time?

Charles

[kryton9]

Have a nice trip and conference Petr! Will the presentation be taped and put on the web?

[Michael Hartlef]

Have a nice trip Petr and take some pictures as well. :)

[Lionheart008]

Topics

Questions and problems of interest include, but are not restricted to:

* Robotics in School
* Teaching and training for robotics
* Robotics Contests
* Robotics Platforms
* Clubs and Afterschool Robotics
* Evaluation and Pilot Studies
* Didactic Approaches and Materials
* Web-based Robotics, Simulation
* Robotics Curriculum

Hi petr, have a nice and impressive time there in bratislava.

I know a funny history from a robot he could produce own screenplays (criminals, horror,comedy) if you saved up (transmitted with all movie plots) to him/her of last ten years. He/her mixed all contents and the result was a criminal-horror-comedy within half an hour and with over 650 pages of screenplay book. the story wasn't realized yet, but it was a good test to see what happened with this intelligent roboty film guy ;)

for education or teaching I see a lot of good offer to live with robot by daily work. but I cannot see any chance to make substitutes for social relationship between man-woman-kids-grandpa-grandmum. I don't know what's your aim for the future to work with robots or only playing soccer with him? I can imagine there will be a robot how can program a new basic programming language in some hours. would that be funny to make correspondence with a robot at the forum ? ;)

good luck with your presentation, servus, frank

[LanceGary]

I am afraid after my performance, everyone will agree the robot would be better choice :lol:


Petr


I didn't mean to put you down. As someone who teaches the thought that went through my mind was to wonder whether this was a conference about replacing teachers with robots of some kind. Not really a new idea I think - Skinner certainly thought that some kinds of automated programs would work better than humans.

I can't remember exactly when and where but I once read a study of the the impact of presentation on audience perception of paper quality. It involved a lecture on game theory. The author of the a paper on the application of game theory to social psychology was asked to present his work to an audience of graduate students and professionals and they rated him as to the quality of his presentation. In another condition of the experiment they got a professional actor to present a garbled or mixed up version of the paper - mixed up so that it no longer really made sense if you thought about carefully about what was said. Again the actor presented to an audience of graduate students and professionals. Guess what the outcome was? Yes, the actor got much better ratings even though what he presented was nonsense. Ah well, such is the world.

Do hope that you have fun and get good feedback from your colleagues.

Lance

[Petr Schreiber]

I didn't mean to put you down.


No problem, I didn't take is in negative way, I am just still scared of what I decided to do :D

Kent - I am not sure, but if yes, I will review it and if not too scary, I will put link here.

Mike - will do!

Charles, I am not sure I will be able to perform "quantum entanglement", but will try, hehe.

Frank, the plan is world domination of robots (aka rise of the machines) and enslaving the surviving human population.
Ok, not really :) I will fill you in once back, now I apologize but have to hurrrrrryy.


Petr

[kryton9]

Petr, is the brains behind John Connor in the future. The bender class was replaced by the S series and then by the infamous T series.
I already placed my order for the Summer Glau model, with the terminate feature turned off.

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi guys,

I am back. Bratislava is place of some contrasts - further from the city center it looks like in 70's or game S.T.A.L.K.E.R, but the city center is very nice.

Paper was presented and is placed in the publication everyone attending the session got, I placed thinBasic website to references as all my images in article are TB based and the technique was coded in it as well. The same article will be published in AT&P Journal Plus magazine as well.

Kent, the Summer Glau models are currently out of stock :lol:


Petr

[kryton9]

Welcome back Petr. Glad you had a nice trip in a beautiful town. Did you hear about anything incredible being worked on?

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi Kent,

well, most of the presented stuff was strictly for educative purposes, so some presentations had information like "if left wheel is turning faster than right one, robot is turning right".
Then there were some interesting mechanical solutions as well.

But I personally liked presentation of some kind of flying robot, with 4 propellers. You can get it for around 300 EUR. It worked quite ok, just once it cut my leg. I can tell you it gives quite horror impression, when you see something making noise in the passages and even in outdoor, about 70x70 centimeters in size and moving deadly fast. It reminded me of little flying robot in Terminator: Rise of the Machines.


Petr

[kryton9]

Those 4 rotor craft are amazing. Here is some new video of one, able to fly though a hand tossed ring into the air, just amazing that it can do it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geqip_0Vjec

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi Kent,

yes it is great!
I think what I saw live had very similar construction to this, if it wasn't this model :)


Petr

[Petr Schreiber]

For anyone interested,

here is the paper I wrote with friends for the conference.


Petr

[zak]

hello Petr
this is an extremely technical paper, sure not for me.
i have an idea about service robots who provide service in restaurants or any limited area place, (if it is not already employed):
the usual idea of the robots is that their brains are attached to them, i saw a robot picture in which the laptop attached to him, but what if the service robots brains located outside of their bodies, such as a cheap desktop with a wireless connection and running the controlling program, now the robot have a wireless receiving/sending device such as used in the small remote controled toyes.
i think this approach are cheaper and more manageable since you can easily manage the controlling program, and commercially you can sell the robot body and the controlling program, the restaurant owner can use his own computer to control the robot, and for controlling more robots, either using a one computer for every robot or using an OS and a program suitable for running all those robots simultaneously. think of the multithreads ideas, or parallel processing and the multi core cpu.
regards

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi Zak,

thanks for your ideas!

Your proposal is very interesting, but such a robot would not pass safety certificate here, I am afraid. Imagine there is some lag in the communication and the robot runs over a child, because he didn't manage to process the input from proximity sensors. Not speaking of fact the robot could be kidnapped by evil personTM and do damage to furniture and people.

The choice of computer is also quite important, as most robot software designs today run in multiple threads, so it again could cause some problems when using "any computer".
Currently, solutions like Nvidia ION ITX boards are quite cheap, and the robot parents have precise platform they can optimize for and do extensive testings whether the sensor fusion is done in time, before they let the robot move in crowded scenarios.


Petr

[matthew]

Thanks for uploading the PDF Petr, I found it quite interesting. :read:

Were you able to take your camera to the conference & film any of the robots?

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi Matthew!,

thanks! The event we attended was called "Robotics in Education", which lasted 2 days, and was followed by 2 day robot competition "Robotour".
We sadly have to leave just after the first 2 days so I did see only few bots in the movement.

The good news is that the people organizing the race provide enough photo material here:
http://www.robotika.sk/robotour/photo.html

Here photo of the robot which cut my left leg by its propeler :D (on photo with cover, but it was flying without it as well):
http://rie2010.stuba.sk/IMG_3830.html


Petr

[kryton9]

I read your paper Petr, well done. I can't say I understood all of it, but I did see why opencl was chosen and the gpu rocks!
Nvidia announced they will come out with a new tegra chip every year for the coming years, so that is great news.
New GPU's will come out every two years.

Locally here, the ion based systems never really appeared, which is frustrating. No ion2's or tegra 2's yet either.
It seems your markets are better than ours here in that you can find such nice hardware.

http://liliputing.com/2010/09/nvidia-new-tegra-chips-every-year-tegra-3-4-on-the-way.html

[Charles Pegge]

Hi Petr,

I enjoyed reading your paper very much, though I won't pretend that I understood all the details. I found the diagrams very clear and conceptually helpful.

Your robot seems to rely quite heavily on central processing which of course is hardly avoidable for vision but I wondered if you use other microprocessors for handling for example motor control or proximity sensors. This was a necessity in the old days with much lower processing power available. I am curious to know whether the trend is to centralise all of the robot's nervous system into one PC.

Charles

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi Charles,

in the current machine we work on (but is sadly not possible to discuss in public before it goes out this Autumn) there is not just single computer, but it is more complex - very close to what you proposed.


Petr

[kryton9]

These are very popular here in the states. I have not personally used or seen one, but I do watch a lot of videos about them and how they are used.

http://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/Introduction

[Lionheart008]

hi petr,

I have a simple question about robotics according to not knowing enough about these topic. Where is the beginning from "hardware" site to start with programming a robotic engineer ? I think it's just not a start with a damned interesting helicopter (with remote control for about 100 Euro) I have seen today at the game play magazine here in my home town ;) I saw this little helicopter for outdoor flying and thought that this little flying object isn't possible to manipulate or re-programming. I am right or not? But where is a starting point for programming in general?
If I can land with helicopter on a mountain and letting flow out some nice little puppets or drones or animals from a hangar ramp and this helicopter can shoot, that's then a robotic vehicle? It's just a simple question, but it would be good to hear from you or other user where to start with term "robotic" ? ;)

bye, servus, thanks, frank

[Petr Schreiber]

Hi Frank,

interesting question!

You can start in many ways:
1/ building your own robot completely
You do the software and hardware yourself. I think lot of people start in stage where the brain of the robot is laptop or netbook OR 8 bit processor like ATMega (http://www.atmel.com/).
The starting hardware could be for example radio control car, where you replace the radio control with custom one.

The laptop way is not the most lucky one, but is good for start.


2/ using already existing starter kit
There are lot of currently, the most popular here are:
Lego Mindstorms (http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx) - relatively cheap, you can combine the hardware as you want, programming environment bundled
Bioloid (http://www.robotis.com/xe/bioloid_en) - the same as for lego, the parts are slightly more solid, but price is higher

There are also some starter kits for flying robots, but writing the software to make it not crash... it might me quite complicated. Imagine by mistake in program during the first test the robot goes 10m high and then falls to floor... it is safer to play with robots on the ground.

and then...?
When you go pro, you need to stop using toy parts and use only reliable industry hardware and solutions, or you'll get into problems very fast.


Petr