Kanamma, we will miss you. Goodbye.
Goodbye
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… and it’s all downhill from here or so they say.
I have a lot on my mind and need to write that down sooner than later. I had the best birthday party and gift ever. Many thanks to my dear friends who traveled the distance. This is Gru, with my home-brew beer kit wrapped inside.
Food
Do you live to eat or eat to live? I’ve been on both sides of the saying and I now believe that what we eat defines how we live. I’ve been following Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and it’s been an eye opener for how little we know about the food we eat. And it’s even more embarrassing for how little we care to know about our food. I’m guilty of this and I know a lot more people who’re on the same boat with me.
Here’s a little push to your wake up call.
Rise of the Machines
I gave this talk at Quanda Convergence on Mar 4th. I was pleasantly surprised with the response the talk received. It was a very good gauge to ascertain if people in general were ready for having more robots in their everyday lives and the answer is an overwhelming YES!
The talk focused on my work in robotics and the kind of questions people asked me when I told that I build robots. While most of them were paranoid as to when we should welcome our robot overlords, others were skeptical if robotics was there yet. We’re somewhere in between today and this talk examined the topic in a lighthearted manner. It touched the various movies that had robots as a centerstage and linked them to real robots or intelligent systems that we have today.
So, when will the robots rise?
Rise of the Machines
View more presentations from vikasreddyenti.
My Grandma – the Fighter
She put up a great fight for the last 20 months but she finally succumbed to her cancer today. She was in pain and had no recollection – she could not recognize my mother (her daughter). I’m sitting here, some 8000 miles away, trying to make sense of it all. I just hope that wherever she is now, she is not in pain.
My grandmother was a fighter with a pure heart, she fought hard so that she could be there for all of our weddings. I’m happy that she was there for our wedding 6 months back.
I’ve thought hard about the possible causes of her cancer and I strongly believe that it is the wood-fired stoves we use in the villages. Inhaling that smoke for over 40 years cannot be good for you. We need to fix this, now.
I’m fortunate to have had lots of fond memories of my grandmother and I will cherish them till the end.
Bye Ammamma.
Baked Grapes
I’ve had about 2 lbs of grapes sitting in the fridge for over two weeks and unfortunately, they’ve started to over ripen. While my usual routine is to throw them out, I decided to bake them today instead. I found the recipe here particularly useful – Baked Grapes . While the recipe suggests that the baked grapes be eaten with yogurt, I over salted mine to make it a standalone dish.
Here are the grapes prior to the bake process.
And here they are again after being baked for 15 minutes at 450F. Besides the change in color, they’ve also gotten a lot more crunchy and salty – just the way I like it.
DAvinCi’s Revival
I came across this article on IEEE Spectrum today and I was pleasantly surprised to see DAvinCi mentioned in Prof.Kuffner’s presentation (slide 17).
Prof.Kuffner’s Presentation -
Cloud Enabled Robots
DAvinCi started with the grand vision of providing intelligence cheaply to a horde of heterogeneous service robots and we made good progress in identifying the underlying technologies and in deploying a SLAM demonstration on a single node Hadoop cluster. We were the only group that existed publicly at that point and I believe we were one of the first to publish the concept of using Cloud-computing for Service Robots. My interest in DAvinCi has been resparked and I’m glad that players like Google have finally taken notice. I look forward to more efficient use of computing ahead.
$100 party balloons
Helium is so desired, and is being wasted at such a rapid rate, claims Robert Richardson (a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, whose research was on helium), that a single helium-filled party balloon ought to cost about $100.
Source: http://www.sciencebuzz.org/blog/running-out-gas-helium
I’m looking for alternative lifting gases. Suggestions?
LEO10 in the news
A hearty congratulations to my students for making the media with their recent accomplishment at the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition held in Michigan in June 2010. They placed 8th out of 48 teams in the design challenge during their debut.Their robot is featured in the front, while my robot Rio is in the background. You can also see our humanoid, HOAP-3 in the edge of the picture. The team members are Dev Chandan (team lead, mechanical), Hitesh Dhiman (software, ROS expert) and Ankit Sachdev (electronics, embedded systems). The picture was taken in my lab.
This is impressive on two counts -
1. The LEO10 team consisted of just 3 rookie members. Most teams have an average of 8 to 20 members.
2. This is the team’s first robot. Most teams have existed for atleast half a decade.
Given this precedence, I’m excited about the upcoming year’s design and I wish the team the very best.
To read the full article, click on – NUS team’s Robotic Turtle is no slouch
Rio 2 – The Holonomic Telepresence Robot
Rio has been constantly evolving in its application and is currently been outfitted as a Telepresence robot for remote surveillance, patient care, elderly and child monitoring applications. While the fundamental technology behind Telepresence robots are equivalent to web-conferencing, the real challenge lies in delivering enterprise level QoS. We are now evaluating methods for data compression on the fly to minimize latency, increase video resolution and to improve the controller frequency.
