Main Page

So the Wiki for IRIDIA is up and running!

Content

Currently there are the following articles:

1. Moving to Brussels - Information on transport, short- and long-term accommodation, inscription etc.
2. Surviving in Brussels - What you need to know once you have found a place to stay.
3. University Administration - The what, the where and the how of navigating university bureaucracy - inscription etc.
4. Workstation configuration - How to setup your personal workstation and laptop, printers, etc.
5. Backup Server - How to use the backup server of IRIDIA
6. Introduction to evolutionary robotics - Reading material for beginners (when Elio gets it done)
7. Robot labs around the World
8. SBOT hardware disassembly - NEW videos on how to take an sbot apart and fix hardware problems
9. Arena time slots - NEW reserve sbot arena time
10. HOWTO Use Fixed IP for the S-bots in IRDIA - How to use the S-bots with fixed IPs

News

• Toward a More Human Robot (BusinessWeek article) - Interview with Takeo Kanade. As director of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute from 1992 to 2001, Takeo Kanade has been one of the pioneers in the field of robotics. On the future of robotics, the US research situation and playfulness.
• Japanese robot to chat lonely elderly out of senility (Yahoo News) - Japan's growing elderly population from will be able to buy companionship in the form of a 45-centimeter (18-inch) robot, programmed to provide just enough small talk to keep them from going senile.
• Army to deploy robots that shoot (News.com article) - Next year, the U.S. Army will give robots machine guns, although humans will firmly be in control of them.
• Pyro (Project) - Pyro, Python Robotics is a top-down approach to programming real and simulated robots. It is a library, GUI, and set of objects in Python that allows beginning and experienced roboticists alike to easily control mobile robots. It comes with a simulator, and also works with Player/Stage/ Gazebo. Hardware supported includes ActivMedia's Pioneer, K-Team's Khepera and Hemisson, Sony's AIBO, Evolution's ER1, and others. It also contains Python code for artificial neural networks, genetic algorithm/programming, vision (V4L), self-organizing maps, mapping, localization, and more AI-related code.
• New EU Cognitive Robot Project (Robots.net) - There is a new four-year, €6.25 million European project to develop a cognitive robot capable of learning, internal representations, planning, understaning language meaning, and social interaction. According to a new ElectronicsWeekly.com article, researchers plan to put the robot together using the best existing AI components that have been developed to date for things like natural language, voice recognition, machine vision and other cognitive and sensory processes. Researchers at the Univeristy of Birmingham describe the process of combining all those bits and pieces into something that works as ambitious and hard.
• The ten secrets of embedded debugging (Embedded.com article) - Debugging your system may be the most important step in the development process. Here are ten hard-won lessons from the embedded trenches. The article covers common problems like memory leaks and optimization problems as well as more unique issues such as debugging software that has to interface with the world through noisy sensors.
• The Real da Vinci Code (Wired article) - Is his mysterious three-wheeled cart a proto automobile? A remote-controlled robot? A rolling Renaissance computer? The quest to rebuild Leonardo's "impossible machine."
• Supercomputer breaks speed record (BBC article) - The US is poised to push Japan off the top of the supercomputing chart with IBM's prototype Blue Gene/L machine. DOE test results show that Blue Gene/L has managed speeds of 70.72 teraflops.

Read more news on robots.net...

Old news

Adding information

A Wiki is an excellent tool to maintain dynamic information. If you want to add something to this Wiki feel very free contact the system administrator and get an account. It is straight-forward to add and change the information in MediaWiki. Simply press edit on the top of this page to see how it was done. If you create a link to a non-existing page within this Wiki you can create that page by following the link - of course you would need a login to do so!. Pictures and documents have to be uploaded before they can be used on pages. All popular image formats are supported and pdf and ps documents are allowed.

For more information on the Wiki mark-up language see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page. When you become good at it, you can make cool looking pages.