My robotic engagement
Robotic Soccer
The Paderkicker soccer robots are developed, mainly by students, at C-LAB,
University of Paderborn, Germany, since 2001.
The robots are supposed to autonomously play soccer, utilizing their primary sensor: vision, to e.g. detect obstacles, goals etc. and to navigate by the position of the flag poles and wheel encoder readings. They can lead (dribble) the ball with maneuverable rolls, and shoot the ball via a small metal ram.
I was a member of the Paderkicker project group #2, and also wrote my diploma thesis, in co-operation with DREAM Lab, partly in Irvine, California, on these robots.
The exact title is "A distributed real-time computing architecture for autonomous robotic environments using Time-triggered Message-triggered Objects (TMOs)".
Ambitious goal of RoboCup:
"By the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champions."
Robotic Racing
Well, a couple of autonomous robots forming a soccer team, that's neat... but check this out: An autonomous robotic car racing through the dessert at 60mp/h - just follwing a path of given GPS points!
The image above was taken at the 2004 QID of the DARPA Grand Challange. The buggy was used for sand dune jumping before. Now it's loaded with a computer grid, sensors and actuators.
That's the prototype pf the computing grid, consisting of several VIA Mini-ITX boards, built in pretty long nights ...
But who wants to code some wicked fancy algorithms in a software lab, and then test them fresh out of the lab on
an autonomous car with 360 horse power?!?
That's what this guy on the left is for, the so-called DREAMbot. Looking like an e-pizza delivery guy, it's loaded with the most important sensors, such as mono and stereo vision, LIDAR, digital compass and GPS, which are hooked up to a couple of networked notebooks and mini-ITX boards.
Driven by two small electric motors, one can easily catch/ stop the robot by hand. Software sucessfully tested on this small test platform than can be transferred and carefully tested on the big buggy.
Still not impressed ?!?
Just some fancy toys, no use for them ?!?
Uhm, ok, ... but check out Kawada's humanoid robots - they rock!
