Fancy name

Soon I will present my project aspirations to some faculty members, and they will decide if I can go on with it...
but I need a "long, fancy and Portuguese" name for it. it's a hard part.

I'm thinking in something like "Desenvolvimento e análise de uma plataforma para sistemas robóticos multi-agentes colaborativos" (Development and analysis of a platform for collaborative multi-agent robotic system). Too big, too fancy...I don't like it =/

Long Delay

Sorry for the long delay in posting! Those last weeks (including this one) had been tough...

But just to break the silence. A nice TED talk about one of my favorite themes: Biological inspired robotics. In this case locomotion:

Swarm on Servo Magazine

Hey, Great news!

This month Servo magazine published a nice article about a swarm project, they use their zhu zhu pet as platform.

One very interesting point they touch is the virtualization of sensors. This deserves a serious post some day.

Well,...

Check it out ! (it's not a mechanical marvel, but very functional for a basic swarm project):

A Modular Architecture for Event-Based Control of Complex Robots

This scary title is the title of a paper I've found on the internet these days.

It's pretty much useful for my research, I was thinking on ways to connect on an organized way a central controller (eLua based) and some "satellite" MCU's doing the dirty jobs (sensors low-level interface, motor control and so on...).

Here is a link, through Dr. Francesco Mondada from EPFL. (ASEBA)

The Wild World of Robots

A nice image found at online schools :

Funny yet informative (on an useless way, but still...)

Eco-Tech, some say swarm is it's biggest triumph

Reading some tech news I've found an Autoworld entry about swarm technology.

It's kinda funny see that car industry is the most excited about swarm technology, but they have their point.

Here is the link to the article, very basic, but still interesting : http://blog.autoworld.com.my/index.php/2009/02/26/swarm-technology-the-biggest-contribution-to-eco-tech/

Off Topic: Robot Motion

This is a little off topic, but motion control on industrial manipulators is an awesome area too so it deserve some space =).

It's quite hard to achieve precision and speed simultaneously, most because of inaccurate position sensors (the most common technique to remove the dependency of speed is a dynamic linearization, or better, a linearization of the robot dynamics by feedback from sensors)

This is a demo by ABB robotics posted originally at Hack a day some months ago...

Behold awesomeness: