Anyways, the process of installing pyro is quite a pain, but thankfully well documented.

First step, install gazebo from Player-Stage website . To install gazebo, please note that you must have a video card which is supported by gazebo, as the program is quite graphic-intensive. A list of supported video card is found here . Unfortunately, my lappy is not supported! (A powerbook Tibook G4). Basically, you would need a Direct Rendering supporting video card to do anything useful with gazebo. It might be possible for me to get it working with a couple of kernel-recompiles, but that’s something I am unwilling to do.

Gazebo is basically a 3-D environment robot (or any) simulation. So, you could have robot simulations in a 3-D environment. It would have been nice to compile it in …sigh!

But on to stage, which is basically a 2-D simulator, with sensors and stuff. This also, can be obtained from Player-Stage website . I did have to install a large number of programs, and libraries to get this working. All details of installation were collected from either the pyro installation page, the readme files, or the player stage installation page. If you just want a list of packages to run from a script, this might be useful.

After I compiled in stage, I went ahead and compiled player, getting the source from the same website and following the README file.

Finally, I compiled pyro, with source from cvs.

Now that I have all of them installed, off to sleep today. Tommorow, we will tackle writing basic programs using python in pyro! have fun!

It’s the Ray Kurzweil Reader, a collection of essays on AI stuff. Looks interesting, so I am gonna give it a read after some time.

The original link is a bit slow due to slashdotting. So, here is a mirror.

It can interact with several simulators. Check out screenshots here.

Out of all the simulators, the Player/Stage system seems the most interesting, along with the robocup simulator .

I will read up more on this and post an update!

The Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technology, or DART, is a flight demonstrator vehicle designed to test technologies required to locate and rendezvous with other spacecraft. The DART mission is unique in that all of the operations will be autonomous – there will be no astronaut onboard at the controls, only computers programmed to perform functions. Developed by Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., the DART vehicle will be launched on a Pegasus rocket to test rendezvous, close proximity operations and its control between the vehicle and a stationary satellite in orbit. The DART mission provides a key step in establishing autonomous rendezvous capability for the United States.

The implications of this are that you probably would not need to send astronauts up into space to do minor repairs or to do routine maintainance. I guess this was an step decided aftet the Columbia aircraft blew apart. Kalpana Chawla, an Alumni of my University and my Department was also part of that tragic accident.

On a different note, this would be huge technological challenge. The amount of controls needed are mind-boggling, and there are systems of sub-systems which need to be coordinated and synchronised to act in the exact way desired in an unknown environment. The satellites move at very high velocities, and even adverse vibrations could make or break the mission. My guess is that there is a higher level of logic, AI even, controlling the lower layer of control system(s) which are less flexible in nature, and react to inputs through the higher logic level.And of course, a lot of sensors!

Links to documents on the above link are pretty descriptive, and help get a general idea of the situation in hand. There is also an animation which shows what is going to happen and how. Have fun!

Imagine a clock which hides when you hit snooze. This clock is equipped with wheels, and runs and hides away in your room after you hit the snooze button. Cool, eh?

I know what would happen if I got such a clock… I would beat the sh*t out of the clock!!

I have a feeling that these contests don’t achieve much, except get kids hooked onto robotics, which is a good thing. Doesn’t do much for robotics research as these are mostly simple robots, but heck…these are kids in school, people who have robots as a hobby.

Add this to the slew of robotics competetions for kids here: FIRST robotics competetions and their likes, and the several competetions for kids held at universities like mine! There seems to be a massive effort to get kids interested in man’s future! Good, things are working according to the plan!!