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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/
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.
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