Where Innovation Meets Imagination
Our new ebook, Robotics and Automation Industry Thought Leaders, is out now.
Featuring a selection of the best interviews from RoboticsAndAutomationNews.com, the epublication makes the perfect gift for your entire social network.
Now available in digital form on Apple iBooks Store, Amazon, and all good online outlets.
Professor Alois Knoll, co-ordinator of the European Clearing House for Open Robotics Development (Echord), and one of the key scientists involved in the $1.5 billion-dollar Human Brain Project, speaks exclusively to Robotics and Automation News
It’s not every day you learn a new word you like. From my point of view, having been in journalism longer than I’d like to recall, it’s an interesting experience to be reminded of an extract from a biography of Dr Samuel Johnson, “father of the English dictionary”, written by James Boswell in 1791, which I read in my teens.
Nothing specific from what I read applies here, but I’ll paraphrase a quote from Johnson which I think may be most appropriate. “A writer only begins an article. A reader finishes it.” [Read more…] about Billion dollar brain: Exclusive interview with Professor Alois Knoll
Exclusive interview with Claude Florin, CEO of Fastree3D, on helping robots finally see the light just that little bit better than they did before
How do robots see the world? Until now, most of them have had to make do with conventional digital cameras for eyes. In technological terms, these cameras are much like those available to consumers in the shops and, increasingly these days, in their smartphones. As clever as they are, and as high quality as the images turn out to be, these cameras only capture the image as a two-dimensional arrangement of pixels.
This means that a robot using such cameras would not able to perceive the three-dimensional space its “eyes” are looking at. This problem of perception – of perceiving 3D space as 2D space – is solved, or at least tackled, at the coding stage.
To program the robot to translate the flat image into a three-dimensional space, and infer such things as depth, distance and geospatial location, is really quite difficult if approached from a purely computer programming – as in, coding – standpoint. [Read more…] about Robot vision: Mine eyes have seen the glory of three dimensions
The total surface of Planet Earth spans some 510 million square kilometres, and the ocean accounts for more than 70 per cent. If there’s one man who would be familiar with these kind of numbers it’s Eamon Carrig, co-founder and chief roboticist at Autonomous Marine Systems (AMS), a US robotics startup which could scarcely have more compelling origins. (See video below.)
AMS was started by three aerospace engineers – Carrig, T.J. Edwards, and Walter Holemans, although Holemans has since left the company.
“We had all been working together on spacecraft mechanisms – TJ and Walt mostly mechanical, me mostly electrical and software – since 2006,” says Carrig in an exclusive interview with RoboticsandAutomationNews.com.
“Specifically we worked on satellite separation systems, which are the last systems that have to work to get a satellite on orbit. In my career as a sep system engineer, we produced about 15 systems for flight. I would have bet my life on every single system we delivered.” [Read more…] about Marine robots: AMS ‘Datamarans’ set to provide unprecedented insights into the world’s oceans
