Canadian National Science Fair
The University of Manitoba hosted the Canada-Wide Science fair for all school levels in May, 2009. We were asked to provide an invited talk to everyone (thanks Shane!) and to open the lab up for group tours. So John and the grad students spent five hours doing the latter, which was an awful lot of talking. Lots more pictures in the gallery
International Conference on Advanced Humanoid Robotics Research
We are chairing the International Conference on Advanced Humanoid Robotics Research, which will take place in Incheon, Korea, in August, 2009, co-located with the FIRA World Cup. Reviews were sent to authors in early May. If your paper was accepted, please consider reviewers comments very carefully in preparing the final version of your manuscript!
Welcoming the President
On July 1st, Dr. David Barnard became the 11th President of the University of Manitoba. Since he is a computer scientist by trade, we were asked to be part of the welcoming ceremony in the Atrium by bringing out one of the robots. It was a bit of an awkward display, since the working infrared connectors for the humanoids were all away on competition, and the back-up cabling was a little finicky, but we still managed to get him up and waving. More pictures in the associated gallery.
New Citizen Robots
We just got the new Citizen (Eco-Be) MicroRobots this morning - two weeks before we have to deploy them at RoboCup! A quick comparison shows them to be squatter and a little bulkier than the first generation Citizens used at last year's Mixed Reality competition, but the design is just incredible. Note the removeable controller board, separating the control system from the robot body, and lots of foresight for future expansion of sensors. The control is much finer too, compared to the first generation, in that each wheel can be controlled at 30 different speeds in each direction.
Rodrigo Guerra put up a nice video demo of these units as well.
