Beast is on Facebook

It seems that Neato has posted something about beast.

Oh the shameless product placement. :)

Largest accomplishment: 
We were the first team to successfully navigate around the telecast building! We displayed full obstacle avoidant behaviors with the use of my stereo camera as the primary sensor for visual odometry.

The platform is just 5 months old, but it works really well for an R&D project. Fun, complicated, and everything you need to stay interested in robotics type of project.

Improved stereo camera

New stereo camera mounted

Thanks again Onshape!

Thanks to the use of an awesome mill, and precise ME. I only need to create a shell for the new and improved mount... since, we're past the R&D stage.

Hot off the print bed, with support material. The Lulzbot works a ton better with the new enclosure I built for it. 

After removing support material:

And after mounting on the actual camera.  I think I'm getting pretty good and fitting like a glove, the first time out of the print box.  But it sure helps to have precision holes. Thanks Chuck!

More platform cleanup

'Beast' can pick up several types of objects now. 

Has a wifi access point for remote debugging. That won't be there later. 

Platform cleanup

Just a handful of computer nerds, a garage full of tools and a lot of beer. 

The tk1's are installed and running robot code. Board dependency nightmare has subsided and testing phase wrapping up. Last week before the real demo. 

jetson tk1 stack

Robot brainstem

Here is the 3D printed jetson tower that's going on the nasa robot. (I had to first build and enclosure for my lulzbot... working great for tall prints now.) We are running one tk1 as the master and one tk1 as a slave. The slave will have to stereo camera, imu and object detection camera (and possibly homemade lidar). The master will have the base detection cameras, motor controllers (and possibly a sun tracker). The 'possibly' depends on upcoming complications during integration over the next two weeks. 

Pictured here are 2 x 2.3GHz quad-cores + 2 x 109 cuda cores...

http://elinux.org/Jetson_TK1

So, I have been working in OnShape to create this. I was invited to be a beta user. It's the core guys from Solidworks that created this CAD system, and it's cloud-based. I have to admit it is a really awesome CAD interface - super intuitive and best part is: It runs in your browser using WebGL. So, it's totally platform independent and in the cloud. Only downside - you will need an internet connection to work on stuff (as most of the complex operations are done on their server)... So, I don't see this being the ideal system to use on a plane trip. But otherwise - it's a pretty amazing app (and idea). 

robots in the urban wild

Robot Sightings...

So, here's what we've been doing lately.

The best part about building robots is that you get to show them off occasionally. We've graduated from test platform video and simulation into something that looks promising. But like every robot... there's still a ton to do.

This robot has a stereo camera (that I built) for about $20... and a couple other instrumentations which will come to life in video over the next few weeks. I probably shouldn't spoil the surprise.

dev: Jetson tk1, upgrade notes with VM

I have been bringing up a jetson tk1 to run a few ROS nodes. 

Upgrading NVidia Tegra TK1 Linux4Tegra rootfs

For these notes, I used a mac vmware ubuntu 14.04 box to upgrade the machine. But I have since moved to developing directly with Ubuntu as a dual boot on my mac. It's just faster and easier.

The first challenge is to get the tk1 environment upgraded. Mine shipped with v19 and that needed some work. After you upgrade, you're on the road to building kernel modules. Of course, after you build their source (from documentation notes), you shouldn't have any issues with dependency tags.

The next hurdle that will be encountered is getting opencv to play well with the gpu. After that, ROS will have it's own set of constraints... because it used opencv, and not opencv4tegra... have fun.

Feel free to use the documented tk1 setup... but note these instructions are tied to an nvidia release. See the nvidia documentation in each release for a more concise guide on building your own setup env.