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April 25 2012
Apply and Participate in the iCub Summer School
IIT has recently released their Call for Participation for this year's (already the seventh!) summer school focused on developing software for the iCub humanoid robot. It will be a great 10 days, at an awesome location, with a very cool robot and enough time to get your hands dirty. If everything goes right IDSIAni will be there too to show what we are working on here ...
We will show what we are working on with our iCub, mainly computer vision, control and planning (with a cool self-collision avoidance suite).
From their call:
The school is a hackathon for robotics researchers interested in any combination of humanoids, free software, open-source hardware, and Italian beaches. Those who would like to participate should email their name, affiliation, and a CV (or relevant website URL) to: vvv12-admin@icub.org
no later than: May 13th, 2012
The aim of the yearly iCub Summer School, with the official title "Veni Vidi Vici", "serves to consolidate and disseminate skills in software engineering for humanoid robots." (from the webpage). It is setup in peer-to-peer fashion with no lectures, and no strict division of instructors and students. The school is organized flexibly around informal tutorials from participants on modules they are working on or interested in. A series of hands-on practical laboratory sessions are the main parts of the 10 days.
Topics of interest are: Motor control, robot design, image processing, software engineering, communication, machine learning, free software, open-source hardware.
This year the school will be hosted at the Mediaterraneo Foundation in Sestri Levante, Liguria, Italy. See the school website for venue details: http://eris.liralab.it/summerschool2012/
March 20 2012
Prospecting a Prospectus
Today it is exactly 13 months since I enrolled as a PhD student here in Lugano, at the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI). It's time to write my research prospectus, or at least try to find out what that is *uhm*
Although I am working for over a year here at IDSIA I have not yet a clear idea what I will do, but I heard that is normal in graduate school. So finally I set down and wrote up some ideas of what I want/can do in the next years to get my doctorate.
There are some rough ideas that I have, mainly just stuff floating around in my brain, but I am pretty sure those are not yet concrete enough for a thesis topic. As I was heavily involved in making the iCub see recently I though that might be of a good start for the work. One of the ideas behind the iCub was to build a robot that can be used to investigate human development and cognition and how to transfer it to robots (see Metta et al).
The platform is particularly well suited for research into object manipulation and interaction. Recently also IIT has posted some positions investigating grasping and transfer or knowledge from humans to robots and maybe the other way around too.
I am currently looking into visually guided grasping for the iCub. Much work has been done on force/touch guided grasping. In our robot though the readout of the force sensor in the fingertips seems to be rather noise and more or less useless (unless you have a nice metallic object). Approaches taken from the (partly overlapping fields of) cognitive robotics, developmental robotics and evolutionary robotics seem to be the most interesting to try and build a sensorimotor representation for reaching and grasping. I think this might be interesting and novel enough, we will see what happens when I try to write this down ...
February 19 2012
Vision-eering
Recently I have been working a lot on trying to make the iCub see things. A fully integrated computer vision or robotic vision system is a quite tricky mathematical and engineering problem. Here at IDSIA we were trying to develop an easy to use system that would allow to rapid prototyping (offline) vision modules for the iCub, mainly to detect and localise objects the robot is in later stages supposed to manipulate and interact with.
Over the last 6 months, I developed the icVision framework, which allows to do just that. It is a modular system based on YARP and openCV. A video is probably the easiest way of showing the capabilities of icVision.
The main modules involved here are the icVision Core module, as well as, the icVision filter modules.
The Core handles the connection with the hardware and provides housekeeping functionality (e.g., extra information about the modules started and methods to stop them). Other modules can attach to the icVision Core and can therefore provide functionality by using standardized interfaces. Currently implemented modules include object detection, 3D localisation and saliency maps.
Some modules also expose their functionality by HTTP (e.g. an image can be grabbed from the HTTP instead of YARP, which increases the number of people that can work with the iCub images in our lab by A LOT).
Most recently we were working on learning how to detect objects and creating filters for specific objects. The teabox filter used in the video is an example of this. This is done using Genetic Programming and is enabled by the very easy way to add new filters. The following is the code for a fully working filter using the framework:
// Author: Juxi Leitner <juxi.leitner@gmail.com> #include <icVision/icFilterModule.h> class RedDetector : public icFilterModule { protected: void setUsedInputs() { usedInputs.Add(1); } public: RedDetector() { setName("RedDetector"); } icImage* runFilter() { icImage* in = InputImages[1]; // red icImage* out = in->threshold(64); // cvThreshold return out; } };
There will be a poster presentation and demonstration of icVision during this year's Cognitive Systems conference in Vienna.
The other area we are currently working on is to learn to localise objects in 3D space. This is a bit more tricky. More on this later :)
September 21 2011
Summer School 2011
Also this year I had the chance to attend a summer school, after ISRIS in 2009 and 2010 school at JAIST, I was going to this year's Hands On Summer School on Neural Dynamics Approaches to Cognitive Robotics in Guimaraes, Portugal.
This school focused on the idea of Dynamic Neural Fields (similar but according to the presentations more powerful than Neural Network approaches) and how to use them in various robotic systems. The presentations, mainly given by researchers from the University of Bochum and Minho, ranged from computer science to neuroscience and included various applications, such as on mobile and humanoid robots (including the Nao and ARoS, a humanoid (upper body) robot built at Minho). The school ended with a project to be implemented (and yes there is a video of ARoS after the jump).
The summer school was held at the University of Minho, which is situated in Guimaraes, the first capital of Portugal, set in a scenic landscape with rolling hills. For a full week we, about 50 students and instructors, were there to learn about NeuroDynamic Fields and robots. After the morning classes and lunch, exercises were held to use the theory in practice, and for the end of the school we were grouped and started working on different robotic projects.
ARoS Robotic Platform
Together with Martin Stoelen, I worked on the ARoS robot platform available to us at Minho. ARoS is an anthropomorphic robot, which consists of a 7DOF arm and a Barrett 3Finger hand attached as end-effector. It uses 2 FW cameras for computer vision and is aimed to be used in Human-Robot-Interaction research tasks.
In our project a joint construction task was used in which the human and the robot need to work together to construct a small toy. The interaction is forced by placing the wheels only within the humans reach and the nuts only within the robots workspace. Therefore to finish the construction the human and the robot need to hand over pieces to their counterpart. DNF were used in layers to represent a cognitive architecture somewhat human-brain-inspired to decide on the current state of the construction task, the workspace, the human's intention and the action to be performed by the robot. Here you can see the robot in action:
There is also a screencast about the activation of the neural fields, have a look at it but it might not make too much sense without further explanation. If you wanna know more just drop me an email.
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
