April 8, 2010
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.
March 15, 2010
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
January 9, 2010
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:
December 11, 2009
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.
November 23, 2009
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
June 26, 2009
jderobot is now able to load Python code with a new command “aload” allowing any kind of script to be loaded and executed inside an embedded interpreter. Thank you to the
Python/C API this task has been easier. Most of the code to do it can be found
here.
Now to load a Python script is as simple as:
jderobot $> aload hello.py
Loading hello.py…
Hello world!
jderobot $>
Future jderobot4.4 will be able to load schemas programmed in Python through
Swig wrappers. Almost all the API will be available within Python and schemas will be able to “talk” to other ones, no matter their programming language.
Go to Source
May 21, 2009
Today, Jose María Cañas and Julio Vega have given a talk about how to compile, link and debug C/C++ applications over Linux platform.
Maybe sometimes there are many problems about how to compile our applications with gcc (GNU C Compiler) or link them with dynamic libraries and how to check the correct linked. Moreover, we usually prefer to include all this process in a simple makefile. So they’ve explained how to build a makefile.
On the other hand, when we have perfectly build our application or executable, we want to know why our application doesn’t work fine… so we need to debug it. They’ve talked about two important tools: gdb (GNU Debugger) and valgrind. Gdb in order to check the internal structure of the program and valgrind, specially indicated to help us to check dynamic memory use.
You can download the PDF slides and also you can see or download full recorded speech on .avi video here.
April 30, 2009
Some days ago I gave a talk at the University of Málaga on jderobot, describing its main features as middleware for robot programming. I was invited by Cristina Urdiales, from the Robotics and Artificial Vision Group of the Department of Electronic Technology.
You can find here the slides that I used in the presentation (in Spanish) . They provide a good overview of the current state of the jderobot project, its principles, foundations and software design. They also present the collection of currently available drivers, developed components, sample applications, etc.
April 16, 2009
The new stable release of jderobot has been launched, it is the 4.3.0 release. You can find it here for download or simply install it from debian packages. Many bugs have been fixed, it includes many improvements and new features:
- Project code managed with AutoTools
- Debian packages created (for ubuntu-hardy, debian-lenny and debian-sid)
- Application name changed to JDEROBOT
- All the code is now licensed by GPL v3.0
- Improved shell
- New drivers: video4linux2, evi (for Sony VID30PTZ) and wiimote.
- New schemas: a camera calibrator, extrinsics, opencvdemo, wiioperator, etc.
Check its release notes for further details.
In addition, several development tools are now used: mediawiki web site, svn repository, trac…. A community has been gathered around the project. We mainly use two mailing lists for communication: jde-users@gsyc.es and jde-developers@gsyc.es.
Most of the developer team gathered at a pizza party on 2009/03/20 to celebrate the jderobot-4.3.0 launch.
Enjoy!
