Category Archives: Research

Collection of all posts relating to my current research interests both at work and elsewhere

DAvinCi’s Revival

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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).

Cloud Computing and Robotics

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.

LEO10 in the news

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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

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Rio 2 – The Holonomic Telepresence Robot

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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.

A robot’s birthday

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Quite possibly my fastest fabrication to implementation for a full fledged autonomous robot. Rio, our holonomic robot, works; flawlessly too.

It was fabricated (mechanical and PCBs), wired, tested and ready to go in less than 12 days, quite a miracle given the failure rate in robotics, the lead time for procuring parts in Singapore and the paperwork involved.

Here’s Rio all wired up and good to go.

Don’t stare at the wheels too long, they make your head spin. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Upio7feAY6w)

Rio, DAvinCi @Robocup 2010

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We’ve been working hard to complete the beta version of Rio just in time for Robocup 2010, which is being held in Singapore from June 19 to June 25.

Just the holonomic version of Rio will be on display – it’ll demonstrate its resourcefulness in guiding “visitors” in a demo environment. Do drop by the A*STAR Booth for quick chat.

The Evolution of Rio

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I never imagined that I would be going through so many iterations of Rio. And these are just from the Alpha prototype to the Beta. Also, I could not accommodate the countless other versions that superseded the Alpha. I need to employ Agile methods in my design planning and fix elements of the design in short iterations.

Lyx in Ubuntu 9.10

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I’ve begun writing up my paper on a low-cost control architecture for mobile robots based on DAvinCi and I wrote it in Word 2007. As good as it is, it is troublesome to export to a different format while retaining the document’s functionality. So I’ve decided to go back a decade and use LaTeX. However, this time round, I found Lyx.

Lyx is a WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX and is my favorite tool beside Word 2007 for writing papers. While Word 2007 now accomplishes most of the benefits of LaTeX had for writing technical papers, when it comes to laying out tables, figures, captions and references, LaTeX still triumphs.

Now Lyx does to LaTeX, what Arduino did to 8 bit microcontrollers i.e. makes it easier and fun to use. While the setup is straight forward in Windows, a few additional packages need to be installed in linux (Ubuntu 9.1) to get access to all the style classes especially the .cls for IEEE Transactions in my case.

To ensure that Lyx is ready for technical publishing, open up a terminal window and paste the following code:

sudo apt-get install lyx texlive texlive-latex-extra texlive-math-extra texlive-science texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-publishers

After installing these packages, reconfigure Lyx by going to Tools->Reconfigure and restart Lyx. Now you should be ready to create a document using the IEEE Transactions layout. Choose article(IEEEtran) as your document class under Document->Settings.

I would like to credit Rob at rrfx.net for the idea. He originally published the tip for Ubuntu 9.04 here.