The FIRA robotics competitions are later this week in San Francisco, and our robots Blitz and Buster will be there competing in humanoid competitions.
The robots are built from the Bioloids platform, and use Nokia mobile phones for vision and processing. Sample videos showing humanoid weightlifting (a clean and jerk) and free kick using these platforms are under Fira2007 in the videos section, and are shown below if your browser supports inline video. These robots will also be appearing at RoboCup in Atlanta in July .
Update: This work was featured in New Scientist magazine's technology blog, June 15 entry.
Update: Galleries and videos from FIRA-2007 are now in their respective sections on this website.
The newest robots in our lab arrived today!
If you are coming here via the redirect from our old site, you may wish to update your bookmarks: we are now at http://aalab.cs.umanitoba.ca.
The autonomous agents lab has had a number of homes through its history.
We started out in incredibly cramped space on the fifth floor of Machray Hall (one office that was widened to two by removing a wall). As the number of students grew and the size of the projects we worked on demanded more floor space, we quickly outgrew this facility.
The department as a whole was cramped for space, and Physics kindly lent us space in a sub-basement whose previous incarnation was a control room for a cyclotron. This space became our satellite operation, which we affectionately referred to as the Dungeon. A number of generations of RoboCup teams were developed there.
With the construction of the new building, the lab found its current home, and we have a new space about equal to the combined older lab facilities. This is the facility we operate from today.
A Map showing the the location of the laboratory on campus is available.