The rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated. I have been too busy doing things to have time to write about them. So what have I been up to?

Human Robotics Interfaces

My robotics internship team has been assigned the task by Anthrotronix to create a platform for testing new robotic input devices. To get a jump start we were given a shell from a prototype of the iRobot PackBot. Over the last few weeks we have been researching and purchasing parts for the robot including: a PC104 Mainboard (it is fricken sweet), microcontrollers, power systems, cameras, ultrasonics and a whole range of other cool components to get this thing up and running.

There is a lot of work to be done but seeing the thing actually move around under its own power on Friday has really got me excited.

Image Processing
I have been spending most of my time writing image processing software with the goal of reducing images down to smaller and smaller pieces of data. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the goal of image processing is to find one or two really useful ones. My primary task is to take video of a person making large hand and arm movements and figure out what movements they are making. For a human being this is an easy task, especially when the gestures are made over several seconds and may be made over one or two feet. But for a computer this task is a difficult one.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming midterm poster presentation:

Controlling Urbie using broad arm and hand gestures is our primary goal. Our approach uses a standard webcam and PC to do processing of the video to detect the motion of skin colored objects in a scene and then match those with a gesture template on a 3×3 grid. The algorithm takes the following steps:

1. Mask the image to match only skin tones

2. Use a timed motion history image (tMHI) to track motion in the scene [Davis, 95]

3. Input x,y over entire motion into stroke matching algorithm [libstroke]

The final output will be a string containg the numbers of the boxes that the motion passed through in order.

Sight Seeing
Being right next to the nations capitol and one of the largest research sites for NASA leads to plenty of opportunities to see some great things. Photos taken by myself and the other 27 interns can be found over at grip.ifup.org/photos. My favorites include the Discovery Channel chopper, the open air spider exhibit at the national zoo and the robots at the Johnson Space Center.

Reading
Between the metro rides, forty minute commutes to work and time spent in airports and shuttles I have had alot of time to read. Before we visit the Computer Science and AI Labs at MIT next month I thought it would be good to read up on Rodney A. Brooks, the lab director. So I borrowed a compilation of his papers on subsumption architecture called Cambrian Intelligence The Early History of the New AI. It is a very good read.

On the fiction side of things I just started “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” and also purchased two books from Orson Scott Cards “Ender’s Game” series: “Ender’s Shadow” and “Speaker for the Dead.”

Tomorrow
At 2am I will be sitting in a big auditorium at the University of Maryland watching some of the first footage from Deep Impact and about 18 hours after that watching the largest fire works display in the country in Washington DC. It is going to be great!