15 Apr

The Robot Compiler (RoCo) is a robotics codesign and fabrication environment to help the general public create their own robots. This graphic shows the modular, co-design interface being streamed through a web browser without users needing to register, download, or install anything. Previously, Ro...

12 Apr

This week we have implemented the hover solution of a single-motor flyer in Matlab, given the mechanical properties: thrust and reaction torque coefficients, drag coefficient, the position of the propeller in the body frame, mass, moment of inertia of the body and the propeller, and the mass of the...

12 Apr

Blog Post: This week, the RoCo Team focused on how to integrate RoCo and the Blender Interface. Since Blender allows customization of its interface, changing the Blender interface to Roco's mechanical, electrical, and interfaces does not seem to be an issue. A natural question that follows is to con...

10 Apr

CoLo has been redesigned for better compatibility and modularity so that it can be easier for user to modify the environment and adding new algorithm. So far, the majority of the new version of CoLo has been implemented. Later, we will add a more powerful analyzer to the environment! Also, we still...

10 Apr

The ML layer and the Gazebo simulation layers for RoCo were developed independently. I worked on the communication between these layers. Each of the layers is dependent on the other at certain stages. For example, for each simulation step, Gazebo needs new control parameters from the ML layer. S...

10 Apr

We can regard Coavariance Intersection as special case of the solution of the barycenter of several probability distributions, when the distance measure is KL divergence. By changing the distance measure, one can get different barycenter of those probability distributions. One of the most important...

07 Apr

I just installed Ubuntu on one of the lab computers. The Kinect detector now works on Linux and can detect depth information.

05 Apr

The Robot Compiler (RoCo) is a robot design tool to help the general population design and fabricate their own robots. This graphic explains the current abstraction model for representing and combining components. RoCo is modular and hierarchical, allowing designers to compose robots by adding sub...

19 Mar

As work on RoCo progresses it became clear that not all robots would necessarily have to be autonomous and that we would need to find a way to add user input in the design process. One of the previous versions of the paperbot had a html page loaded in the microcontroller, which would accessible from...

19 Mar

This week I spent a lot of time fixing stability bugs with the ORCAS system and gathering data with the reinforcement learning system. With a learning system, stability is extremely important as learning can takes days or even weeks which means that any small issue can completely bring down the whol...