Jderobot

Hace unas semanas el profesor Nelson Muñoz, del Politécnico Colombiano Jaime Isaza Cadavid (Medellín), me invitó a impartir una conferencia sobre jderobot para sus alumnos egresados y los miembros del grupo de robótica de este centro universitario.

La charla se titula Programación de aplicaciones en robótica, visión artificial y domótica. En ella conté la versión 5.0 de jderobot y presenté muchos ejemplos programados con nuestra plataforma en esos tres ámbitos. En todos ellos se manejan sensores, actuadores y cierta inteligencia entre ambos. Echando la vista atrás a los últimos siete años hemos hecho muchísimas cosas y sistemas interesantes!!. Aquí están las trasparencias de esta charla.

A parte de su hospitalidad, fue un placer descubrir que utilizan jderobot para la investigación con su robot todo-terreno. Casi se me cae una lágrima al ver el pantallazo inicial de jderobot-4.3 al arrancar el ordenador principal de su robot

The new stable release of jderobot has been launched, it is the 5.0.0 release. It takes into account the lessons learnt with previous releases.

1. The general architecture has been fully redesigned to be component oriented. Applications are a collection of one or several components running and interoperating between them.
2. It uses  ICE and explicit interfaces for communication between the components
   
3. Multilanguage: the components may be written in different programming languages, they interoperate smoothly
   
4. Distributed: the components may run in different machines, PC, smarphones, etc.
   
5. Debian packages created for easy installation
6. All the code is licensed by GPL v3.0
7. Components: cameraserver, cameraview, gazeboserver, introrob…
8. Included support for v4l cameras, video files, Gazebo simulator, Stage simulator, player devices, kinect sensor, Nao humanoid…

You can find it here for download or simply install it from debian packages. More details in the Manual page at the official web site http://jderobot.org

Example: Gazebo and Introrob component

I am pleased to present GNao, a Nao Robot simulated in Gazebo.

I have created GNao using Gazebo and we can control it with his own library (libgazebo) or with NaoOperator(an aplication created by Francisco Rivas).

GNao has the same height, weight and degrees of freedom that real Nao.

In this link you can see some videos.

Currently I am working on supporting modular robots in JDERobot 5.0. As a first example, I have created the Servo1 component. It is a virtual Y1 module that can be moved to any position in the range [-90,90]. It has been programmed using the OpenMR plug-in for OpenRave (in C++). The client is another C++ program that just let the user to type in the desired position for the servo.

ICE is used for the communication between the client and server.

Here there is a Video demostrantion. The sources can be found in this SVN repository.

Obijuan

We’re glad to present the first prototype of monoSLAM working inside jdeRobot platform.

MonoSLAM is for monocular Simultaneous Location And Mapping, a computer vision technique which permits to estimate in real-time the relative position of a moving camera with respect to several landmarks extracted from the environment, using only the image sequence that provides the camera.

It is potentially helpful in visual odometry for robots, specially for those whose mechanical odometry is poor (e.g. legged robotssuch as Nao). It can also be used for augmented reality systems and scene reconstruction from video sequences.

You will always find a video of the latest prototype by following this link:

Latest video

Dr. Pilar Bachiller from Universidad de Extremadura has presented the system developed on her PhD in order to get the robot behavior based on visual attention for mobile robots. The design of a control architecture for a mobile robot involves seeking solutions to issues such as analysis and interpretation of sensory information provided about the environment, the limited scope of the sensors, the limited time to process image and maintenance of multiple behavioral objectives.
You can download the PDF slides and also you can see or download full recorded speech on .avi video here.

Today, it seem impossible that we can’t control anything from our mobile device. I’m using JDEROBOT software to create a video-surveillance system based in software libre and low cost hardware.

A good feature for this system is the total control from the mobile device. In this case, we use a Android device (HTC Magic) and our problem is connect both systems: JDEROBOT (linux) and SecurityApp (Android). There are many options for this as: rpc, webservice (xml+soap) or some distributed framework. We opted for ICE (Internet Communications Engine) that is a distributed system based in definition of interfaces language.

“The Internet Communications Engine (Ice) is a modern object-oriented toolkit that enables you to build distributed applications with minimal effort. Ice allows you to focus your efforts on your application logic, and it takes care of all interactions with low-level network programming interfaces. With Ice, there is no need to worry about details such as opening network connections, serializing and deserializing data for network transmission, or retrying failed connection attempts (to name but a few of dozens of such low-level details).”

· The Android/Java Code: We try show the image captured by webcam in the Android mobile.

 Ice.Communicator communicator = Ice.Util.initialize();
 Ice.ObjectPrx base =
     communicator.stringToProxy("varcolorA:tcp -h 193.147.51.113 -p 9999");

 // Varcolor and Image are interfaces defined by us.
 if (base == null)
    Log.e("Main","Could not create proxy");
 else
 {
     VarColorPrx vprx = VarColorPrxHelper.checkedCast(base);

    if (vprx != null) {

        ImageData image;
        image = vprx.getData();

        // In image variable we obtain the image data.

    }

 }

Easy, right?

· The Result: The next photo shows how the android mobile can show the image captured by webcam. The webcam is connected to laptop where JDEROBOT is running.

Test Android-JDEROBOT-ICE

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