Beagle-Book Update

Doesn’t look a whole lot different, but I’ve added a small cooling fan for the DLP and it’s been rewired to run from a single 5V@2.6A wall wart (sorry for the shoddy cell-phone pic) :

Syndicated 2011-06-24 19:37:58 from robotguy.net/Blog

Beagle Box

I got a BeagleBoard for Father’s Day. My plan is to put the BeagleBoard, the Pico Projector and a battery in a small box, write some ALife software and carry around a virtual world. Tonight I started mounting the board and projector inside a fake book:

Syndicated 2011-06-24 04:55:12 from robotguy.net/Blog

Simple Embedded Architecture for Robot Learning and Emotion

I’ve been working on a paper about robot learning for over a year now, more as a place to organize my thoughts than anything else. This paper outlines some ideas I’ve been having about how to implement a learning system that let’s a robot relate state-action sequences to a result. It’s still extremely sketchy, but I thought I’d make it public:
Simple Embedded Architecture for Robot Learning and Emotion
Sorry for the shoddy formatting, but that results from publishing a Google Doc as HTML.

I also have a few background documents that may be interesting* to some:

Senses/States Matrix
Emotional Effects on Outputs
Robot Emotions versus Movements

My current mental obsession is an ALife simulation running under Linux, and I thought I would try out this learning architecture in a simulated environment on a capable processor.

*I find this stuff extremely interesting, but then according to my teenage daughters I’m weird. Of course they think weird is a compliment.

Syndicated 2011-05-25 18:55:36 from robotguy.net/Blog

Photo Competition

My Favorite Photo (I’ve Ever Taken) 3 Brickfish

Syndicated 2011-01-10 16:46:10 from robotguy.net/Blog

Something useless for xmas

I needed a ~$5 gift for family xmas this year, and was at a loss. Then I remembered the Useless Machine from Make, also known as a “Leave Me Alone Box.”  I had a $5 box from the thrift store, a smaller version of the one I used for my iPad Charger.  After a lot of planning in AutoCAD and even more trial and error I came up with this:

It took me a while to figure out how to put it together with the cam attached to the lid, and my daughter suggested a rod & tube setup:

The cam is connected to the lid through a bearing and a brass “bicycle fork”:

When the cam spins, it lifts the lid enough for the arm to come out and flip the switch.

One thing that I did slightly different was use a 5V DPDT relay to reverse the motor instead of a DPDT  switch. This allowed me to use a SPDT switch with a lower actuation force.

Syndicated 2010-12-19 05:08:22 from robotguy.net/Blog