My first blog post. How super exciting. Lets get one thing straight right from the get go. I can’t spell, I don’t want to spell and I don’t care if bad spelling annoys the crap out of you.
Now we’ve got rid of the grammar police I can move on to the reasons I’ve decided to bless the Internet with my blogging presence.
- I’ve seen a lack of these so called blogs and I feel compelled to change that
- I’m about to start getting back into robotics and feel blogging my success/failures MIGHT actually help other people (which is what I understand the point of blogs to be)
- I really, really want to put links on random words in my blogs that point to funny things.
So I’ve been inspired to get back into robotics and AI programming after my super smart friend Glennzor showed me the “new” Lego Mindstorm robots that you can get. Basically its a programmable board sitting in a Lego Technic shell. It has some shit GUI programming for it, but can be (from what I understand) programmed using a higher language.
At $380 a pop for the setup its a little out of my price range at the moment because of a small cash flow problem I’m having with the ATO. Those crazy cats, gotta love’em.
But once I get my hands on one it will be a good refresh back into robots for me. I did an Engineering course at Uni where I made a robot using a Motorola Chip that could use IR sensors to follow a simple track and find its way back if lost.
While that doesn’t sound cool, believe me, it was. There were two things I didn’t like about the subject though. The first was that I had to code in assembly language. I hate assembly language. The second was that watching a robot car follow a track isn’t all that fulfilling. However, I did get to learn a lot about the basics of how to let a robot control its moments autonomously.
The second (and more important) thing I did in Uni was an AI subject. I think it was called “Intelligent Agents”. I did some really cool stuff in that which ended up being an assignment in Java that kinda used Evolutions theory of survival of the fittest on virtual fish. The fish basically had attributes like
- Distance from another fish
- Speed of swimming
- Distance away from a virtual shark (which was your mice cursor)
So using your shark you could kill off fish that were out on there own (like what a shark would do in nature). As you killed off fish they were replaced by combining the Chromosome attributes of the remaining fish to form a new fish. Basically letting the surviving fish have a bit of a shagfest.
After a small amount of time you could see all the fish banding together and moving away from your little shark as a group just like in real life. Who’d have thought.
The professor that took this class was blind and was doing research in Robotic Vision which also sparked my interest.
So the past two weeks I’ve been busy thinking up crazy Robot challenges for me to work on. 99% of these I don’t see myself ever completing but here they are -
- Using only normal video inputs from cameras, get a robot to have depth perception and internal local mapping using an array of techniques not restricted too
- Bifocal Cameras
- Auto Focus algorithms
- Structure from motion
- Cameras being able to pan/tilt independent of the main “head” i.e like our eyes do
- Use machine learning to let a robot work out the quickest and safest way to navigate through a dynamic maze.
- Get a robot to be able to recharge itself autonomously.
- Work on doing something with a lot of small redundant robots that use Collective AI to communicate and solve a problem that one itself couldn’t solve.
Oh I have more but this will do for now. Some of us have to get up early in the morning. I’m luckily not one of them 
