October 2011 Archives

Thecorpora has made a great commitment to open source with Qbo, a robot with great robotics technology for everyday consumers. To work on integration ideas, Qbo and his friend, Francisco Paz, stopped by Willow Garage to meet the team and Willow Garage robots, such as the PR2. You can checkout photos of Qbo hanging out with PR2 and other robots at Thecorpora's blog.

Also on the way from Thecorpora is a new Android phone application for Qbo that provides telepresence; hear, see, and communicate with Qbo as if you were in the same room. Imagine getting Qbo to go where you want or direct it using Google's speech recognition software. This new app makes Qbo a telepresence in any room. For details, see their blog post and video.

Related:

• Robots Using ROS: Qbo

Weeding in organic orchards is a tedious process done either mechanically or by weed burning. Researchers at University of Southern Denmark and Aarhus University created the ASuBot (Aarhus and Southern Denmark University Robot), a self-driving tractor, to handle navigate around trees in organic orchards. Weeding is done using gas burners that the ASuBot makes sure is not damaging the trees.

ASuBot is built on a Massey Fergusson 38-15 garden tractor outfitted with a SICK laser range finder and Topcon AES-25 steering. It is able to navigate autonomously without the use of GPS antennas, which would not work under shaded trees and would also make the robot more costly.

The FroboBox, the ASuBot's on-board computer, is a Linux-powered computer running the FroboMind software that runs on top of ROS. FroboMind provides a common, conceptual architecture for field robots and has already been integrated with five different platforms.

For more information about ASuBot and FroboMind, please see fieldrobot.dk.

Announcement by Armin Hornung, Humanoid Robots Lab, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg to ros-users

I'm pleased to announce a major update and rewrite of Freiburg's footstep planner in the humanoid_navigation stack, mainly contributed by Johannes Garimort. The planner is now much faster and builds on SBPL. In addition to the previous D* Lite implementation, this now enables anytime planning e.g. with ARA* or AD*.

The ROS interface was largely kept compatible and you can interact with the planner using RViz as planning GUI (instruction on the wiki page). You can check out the humanoid_navigation stack from alufr-ros-pkg.

Best regards,
Armin