Amazing bionic elephant trunk

Wow. I've seen a number of neat Festo demos, but this is nearest and dearest to my heart. Krishna found it.

Now, how can I get my hands on one of these? :)

Fun links

My inbox is growing, so I need to spend time to day thinning it out. Ouch.

Luxury cars run on 20+ million lines of code. Wow.

A student built a neat hexapod. According to the story, parts came from Crust Crawler Robotics, though I can't find them on that web site. It's powered by an on-board Intel Atom packaged as the Fit-PC2. Very impressive! Here's the video:

It looks like some research groups are making progress on the nanocam featured in Alex's body book!

Here's another video showing applications of that idea. It's a year old, but still seems like a simulation.

My list:

• Cal Dan Stutts
• Create test 2 for Micro
• Work on paper review
• Work on review paper revision
• Write recommendations
• Make SECON hotel reservations

Today's list

Looking around a bit more at the AVR community, it seems that WinAVR is the most common choice that many use to write C code for the AVR. However, there's not IDE; instead, it uses makefiles. Ouch. Not a good choice for teaching.

I recently did a voice-over for a simulation Buddy produced which shows the behavior of a fiddle string. I found this behavior complex and fascinating. Buddy's working on a version which will show the string in 3-D; below is a 2-D slice. Using Camtasia made is so easy to quickly record this.

I spend some time yesterday evening creating my new personal home page on the web, since my old home page is years out of date. It's fairly simple, but at least a start.

I felt like a kid in a candy store yesterday while order parts for the Summer Bridge program. I hadn't realized that Pololu (named after a valley in Hawaii) offered some many nice robotics parts. I'm also glad I could finally get the order placed; it took a while, but I think I found most of what I need.

Little did I know, but the first annual National Robotics Week will be held from April 10-18!

Today's plan:

1. I still need to update the Micro libs with the bug fix.
2. Spend a small amount of time on p14p. My plan is to put small but steady amounts of time in, since I can't afford to spend a lot of time on it.
3. E-mail as always. I'm mostly caught up, with just a few items to take care of.
4. Call Dan Stutts to finish our earlier conversation. Though not pressing; I can also do that on Wednesday.
5. Research -- I need to review a paper, revise two papers.
6. Funding. I really need to do this, but with other deadlines looming it's not looking like I'll make much progress. Perhaps I can put together one slide or make some other small quanta of progress.
7. Type in corrected Micro grades.
8. Clean up. My office is a dump. Update: better now.

Organiziation

The plan for today:

1. Check with Sol on the Micro parts order. Yesterday, I verified that the three power supplies he sent would work. This also means we can move to a cheaper power supply, I think.
2. Order parts for the Summer bridge robot. In particular, I'd really like a PIC24HJ128GP502 to play with.
3. p14p work - I figured out an important bug (building the same binary using two different versions of Python). Now, I can code on the PIC24 port and also work on Doxygen generation.
4. Recommendation letter for Brad -- need to do that today.
5. Weekly meeting for the robotics research group. I'd like to do a paper review, but don't have time for that today. The review is due the 22nd?, so I do need to get started.
6. Work on the review paper. It's due the 18th, so I need to jump on it.
7. Update the Micro libs, based on a bug report.

Weekly meeting:

1. Group lunch - Friday at 12:30?
2. Task list - review and update.
3. Review and update group policies - place dates for future sessions.
4. Neat movie found by Krishna
5. Research update
1. Dr. Jones
1. p14p - Progress; working on developing hardware interface libraries.
2. Funding - NASA pre-proposal rejected
3. Met with the Industrial Technology group on robotics collaborations.
4. Turned Buddy's amazing sim into a movie.

Meetings and e-mail

Bob passed on a neat quiz on embedded C. Wow -- I only got a 70%. Good stuff! The only annoyance is the registration requirement.

I've spent most of my morning working through e-mail, scheduling meetings, etc. It's amazing how just e-mail backs up.

Today is our research group meeting. Topics:

1. Introductions - Justin and Jae-Pyung are new.
2. Videos - from Ankit and a paper to review.
3. Machining help - the Industrial Technology group is will to make things for us.
   
4. Research update - everyone talks about what they're doing and any recent progress
1. Me - My focus is marketing, followed by the paper with Durga.
1. Ankit's movie 
2. Summer bridge / Micro demoBot / Intro to Robotics base - with Cory
   
3. The SECON movies are now on my YouTube channel.
4. Three of our group's videos will be featured on the IEEE RAM YouTube channel.
5. Prepare a quad chart, two slide summary, three slide summary of the group's research.
   
6. Brainstorm on a good image / movie to showcase our group.
7. Web site updates and improvements.
   
2. Buddy - dynamics works!
5. Procedures
1. Review group policies. New: responsible conduct of research requirement to receive NSF funding.
2. YouTube videos and audio tracks - from what I can tell, our videos don't constitute fair use. We need to use only free music. Sources:
1. http://freesologuitar.com/, -- checked; this is truly FREE.
   
2. YouTube's AudioSwap -- but they reserve the right to put in ads.
3. Google for "free legal mp3" gives http://www.bestmp3links.com/ (unchecked), http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/08/31/35-places-to-download-free-legal-mp3s-music/ (unchecked), and more.
   
4. http://www.archive.org/details/opensource_audio (unchecked)
5. NOT FREE: http://freeplaymusic.com/ prohibits free usage for Internet videos (see item h on their terms of use), charging $100 per song!
   

Marketing, maybe?

Tuesdays and Thursdays are my marketing (and research) days. However, there's always the odd task or two that still needs doing before I get to that. Today's surprise: converting the bootloader to 2005 forced me to fix some whar_t to char conversions I'd ignored earlier. That turned into a project, but is done now.

While I still have the trial version, I'm now working on converting the full SECON movie to YouTube.

Sounds like military robotics is hot!

For marketing, things I can think of:

• Publicity
• Submit my robotics movies to the IEEE RAM YouTube channel by e-mail to Johnanthan Roberts (videos at ram dot ieee-ras dot org).
• Send my robotics photos to srikanth dot saripalli at asu dot edu for use in a Robotics and Automation Magazine cover.
• Publish something in the department newsletter
• Marketing
• Post Ankit's video when it's ready
  
• Improve our group's web site
• Come up with an idea for an amazing image or movie to showcase our group.
  
• Create a quad chart to summarize research group thrusts.
• Put together a one-slide, two-slide, and three-slide research group summaries then meet with Lori, Gary to get their feedback and ask them to shop these ideas for me.
• Work with Jean, Mike to publicize and recruit.
  
• Funding
• Look for and apply for funding of any sort I can think of.
• Continue writing and revising my CAREER proposal.
• Schedule an Eglin visit.
  

I figured out how to embed a playlist without creating a custom player: it's hidden in the "Edit playlist info" dropdown. Here's the SECON 2008 full version:

Administrivia

It seems like I'm just tying up lots of loose ends today. That's not much fun, but certainly is necessary.

• Micro:
• Attendance sheet
• Prereq checks
• File folder labeling and clean-up
• Lab writeup editing
• Create a ZIP with the latest library
• E-mail Tommy re: Summer bridge purchasing
• Yearly review writing
• Record laser cut tutorial again
• Return a call

In working on some YouTube videos, I'm now trying to only use free audio tracks. Though it's still confusing how all this works (when does this constitute fair use), using only free music is best. Which leads to the question: what are good free music sources, not contaminated by commercial songs from a website which claims only free content? Perhaps YouTube's AudioSwap is easiest, and should be 100% legal. But it seems like I can't mix in more than one song and ads may still be displayed.