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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 :)
November 30 2011
European Robotics Week and IDSIA Robotics
This year's European Robotics Week sponsored by the EU though one of its Framework Programmes (EUnited Robotics) is currently underway and there is a lot of things to see and do. Labs offering demos and presentations as well as hands-on workshops about the on-going robotics research in Europe. A new webpage www.robotics-labs.eu was started where one can check out the various labs and for some of them even be able to see live webcam feeds.
For IDSIA we did not get a webcam, but we nevertheless uploaded a movie about us and our current activities. Enjoy the film after the jump.
August 31 2011
What the iCub Does During Holidays
Leo here at IDSIA has been working on a really nifty nice demo of what you can do with the iCub simulator, if you are willing to get your hands dirty and go into the code. The following video shows the outcome.
iCub Dancing Rave
How cool is that?! This is the simulator with a changed dome and some nifty floor tiling. Okay the sunglasses I think is scripted but the rest is using a beat detector which sends the commands via YARP to the simulator.
Some Coding
Finally I wanna put some info online about what I actually do here at IDSIA. Right now I am mainly working on the iCub robot and I am currently looking into some computer vision related problems, like image segmentation and object detection (for object manipulation later on). Here is a small teaser of what we are currently working on....
We recently started looking into getting some position data out of the 2D images and the kinematic chain of the robot, but we are not really happy with the results. To gather some data I worked on some piece of code to automatically do just that. To use this data as either training of test set for our approach (as well as a benchmarking) related to the object placement. Hopefully we get it working on the real HW soon too..
More info to come at a later stage ...
July 14 2011
Broken Shoulder
The iCub's shoulder, how it should not look
So the last two days we had the IM-CLeVeR Review Meeting here in Lugano and I helped showing some of the demos to the roughly 50 people involved in the project. As usual with robotics demonstration everything that could went wrong, and while reseting the software and homing the iCub, its shoulder decided to pop, as you can see on the picture.
Broken Shoulder in Detail
Luckily it seems like just the tendons are popped out of their places on the shoulder, so no ripping of a cables or breaking of the hardware. So now we are back to cleaning up and repairing the robot.
July 10 2011
ACE/YARP on Mac – The Easy Way
Good news everyone!
Paul Fitzpatrick just posted this on the robotcub hackers list, a very quick and easy way to install ACE and YARP on OSX:
ACE and YARP are now available through homebrew, a package manager for Macs [1]. On a fresh Mac with Xcode installed, you can install YARP by opening a terminal and doing:
# install homebrew
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/gist/323731)"
# install ace, gsl, gtk+, and yarp
brew install yarpCheers,
Paul
That gets a big yay from me! Thanks Paul!
February 08 2011
Project Work
In the last few weeks I was getting started with looking into the projects I am (supposedly) working on during at least the next year here at IDSIA. For the foreseeable future I will focus my attention on mainly two projects, both funded by the European Union's Framework Programme. The first project is called STIFF and is lead by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), more precisely their section working on biorobotics. The second one is named IM-CLeVeR and the partners include CNR (in Rome), Universities of Ulster and Aberstwyth (UK).
STIFF
This is the project I am currently spending most of my time on. STIFF is a research project on enhancing biomorphic agility of robot arms and hands through variable stiffness & elasticity (officially named Enhancing Biomorphic Agility Through Variable Stiffness). It is funded by the 7th framework programme of the European Union (grant agreement No: 231576). IDSIA is responsible for learning high-level task-specific controllers based on reinforcement signals for the flexible variable-impedance robot arm developed by DLR, and for extracting cost functions from human behaviours in collaboration with UEDIN (also sometimes referred to as inverse reinforcement learning). I am working here together with Tobias (evolutionary search for cost functions), Jan (Neurocontrollers) and soon Simon.
IM-CleVeR
This project focusses on the iCub robot and how it can learn to interact with its environment. The project is funded by the EU Framework Programme and is officially called Intrinsically Motivated Cumulative Learning Versatile Robots.
As a main outcome, the project will significantly advance the scientific and technological state of the art, both in terms of theory and implementations, in autonomous learning systems and robots. This overall goal will be achieved on the basis of the integrated work of a highly interdisciplinary Consortium involving leading international neuroscientists, psychologists, roboticists and machine-learning researchers.
It is quite a big project here at IDSIA and a lot of work is done to make the iCub perform right now. The main parts I am working on currently are to get the software setup and start on the interface between the Machine Learning (Reinforcement Learning) group and robotics. Right now I am helping to make the iCub see things, that is helping on the computer vision part of the project.
More info can be found on my projects page.
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