silly

 

These are the things that keep me from getting the really good grades in school

 

Robot Fever from Z R on Vimeo.

 

Just got commands to push over zigbee, so I should be doing much cooler things shortly…

Surgical Proceedings

Been busy with classes this quarter- as usual i gave in to the allure of really cool sounding classes as well as the carrot and stick diploma thing…
but srsly- check out this schedule:

Sex – no its not offered through Exercise and Sports Studies ; actually a relatively easy sociology class that will count towards GE reqs. Im currently writing this instead of studying for the midterm that’s 32 minutes away.
Data Structures and Algorithms – a class that makes you think ‘damn that was clever’
Compilers - a class that makes you think ‘damn that was REALLY clever’
Ethics for Engineers- how to lie to your self in the mirror
Digital Control Design – a crazy amount of work for an upper division elective , but really worth it. The teacher [zomg] seems to actually care about her students learning and being interested in controls! I feel a lot of the loose ends from last quarter rapidly coming together.
xxxSmartphones – bi weekly seminars on the current technologies – learn the API on your own time.xxx =( dropped this one…

[wow wordrpress you suck at del, strike, and s tags]
So there’s my excuse for going a month+ between posts. Worse still, it means the fun non-curricular stuff now has to be saved for weekends…
Anyway here is the current run-down on the progress of these weekend amusements:

The FBVisual project has been kind of set aside for the moment, I made a few more screens (pictured below) which I don’t really consider to be 100% complete – but they are kind of neat as proof of concept, and at some point I would like to get them more polished.

What up: a cloud map in a word bubble. Larger words are words that appear more frequently, smaller words are less frequent. The left bubble was derived from a scan of all my friends current ‘status’ on facebook, while the one on the right it taken from the ‘about me’ section. Of course, I also do some filtering to get rid of words that are very common and not so interesting (prepositions and such) to make the good stuff pop out. Shows some interesting trends, especially around holidays or big events. Things like ‘snow’ ‘christmas’ ‘family’ and ‘new year’ emerged pretty strongly when i ran it a few months ago – wish i thought to run it on valentines day , I would have expected to see some lovey-dovey stuff come out.

She started out as an RB2000 kit I picked up during my travels East and will now in the process of being outfitted with some additional additional smarts and weaponry for that mech-warfare challenge.
When I heard about the challenge, it really caught my imagination and I thought it was just wayy to cool to pass up – the rules (in short) are as follows:
-No looking at the battle arena, except through a wireless camera mounted on the bot
-Robot must walk on legs
-Destroy all other robots!
(ok, in actuality they are a little more in depth, but you get the idea)

and this coming year , if all goes according to plan, they will be adding a ‘hardcore’ class which promotes the use of CO2 pistols, Flamethrowers, and Micro Rockets .

High tech + red neck = my kind of sport.
I bet you can guess which class I’ll be trying to enter =D
Major modifications to the RB2000 thus far:
New Skull – surgically inserted my nifty custom machined mounting bracket, wireless wide angle camera, zigbee mount, and red LED in the eye for good measure

Laser mounted and attached to arm - hopefully this will be sufficient feedback to let a remote machine know what the arm is pointed at through the computer vision loop. I have it tested and working with a fair amount of reliability, but it could definitely be improved.
New battery connectors!- ok maybe not so exciting – but will allow me to connect up my new 3Ah lithium polymer batteries alone, or 2 in parallel. Only thing that’s kinda a shame (for the efficiency junkie in me) is that the batteries are 7.2v and the board just uses a 5v linear regulator- which is like a 30% loss! There will still be plenty of juice, but if im feeling like a badass I may try to include a switching regulator stage at some point.

Zigbee board- purdy aint it?

The lovely thing was that when i finally got all the parts I needed to test it, I managed to kill the main servo driver board by (I think) shorting the 3.3v src to gnd with the dmm..
I wont repeat all the expletives uttered here, but suffice to say I was pretty unhappy.. Its looking like a replacement will run somewhere between $200 and $390 which and there would be a 2-3 week lead time to get the part from Japan. painful.

before I totally give up on repairing the thing, Im going to try just swapping out the 3.3v smc regulator with the hope that that’s all that got fried, but who knows…
wish me luck!

Too much privacy to be Geeky?

  
Dilemma:
Privacy is a good thing, I am a proud member of the EFF and support the notion that everyone should be careful how they share their personal data.
However, now that I have a budding interest in data mining and information visualization, all of my friends who have tightened down the bolts on their facebook profile seem to be limiting my potential to do really awesome shit with the facebook api :/
Specifically, I am referring to the (relatively new?) facebook privacy options which allow users to make less information available to a app being run by a user, than would be available to that user if they were visiting the page in a browser.
  
Solution(?)
Amateur non-commercial facebook application privileges. An app could be registered such that its use would have several restrictions (small number of users, non-commercial, etc) but in exchange it could get access to everything that was already available on the users page, but still subject to the restrictions/blocks dictated by the friendship connection. This could even be managed through a “some of my friends are geeks” option, enabled by default, within the privacy settings. This way absolutely no amount of control over privacy would be lost with this addition.
  
If you are reading this , what do you think? Still too scary? Far fetched? I’d be interested in hearing other opinions

FB Visual; work in progress

Here’s a preview of what I have been working on lately: 

facebook friendverse visual from Z R on Vimeo.

 
A 3D data visualization, done in processing that takes info off the facebook API and uses it to bring some things to light about my list of friends, and what is going on in my facebook existence. In short what you see above is each one of my friends being placed in an orb with a mass proportional to the number of mutual friends we have, and connected to each mutual friend by a purple line representing a simulated pseudo spring/dampener system. Each friend is also connected to a fixed point (representing me) via a much weaker blue spring. Once everything is connected and the orbs are released from their might-as-well-be random positions, some kinda interesting behavior emerges.
 
  After the initial chaos settles, clusters organically form and begin to move independently. Its impossible to tell from the video, but each one of these clusters can actually be traced to the different circles of friends I’ve made in the past . The largest cluster is obviously UCSB, and some of the smaller ones I’ve linked to the high schools I went to, friends I made studying in Japan, people I’ve reconnected with from middle school, and even highschool summer programs. Kinda neat.
 
 
There is also another screen (no video yet) that, in a similar manner does a live display of everything occurring in the current user’s (ok only me so far) news feed. So if two friends write one another, they both appear, the spring slingshots from the sender and they oscillate vigorously for a few minutes until the dampening slows ‘em down. Visually, I still think it needs something though…  
 
I also plan to do a few, more statistical/informational, screens in 2d that give info about my friends as a group; things are looking busy until winter break but I hope for the time to implement this soon. Ultimately what I want from this project is something I can dedicate a computer (or a Chinese ipad) to and stick on my wall to be pretty and optimally tell me a bit about my social interwebs. Once I get it done I’ll try to make it easy to run between multiple users and post up the source.
     

Passive Dynamic Locomotion!

Now that I’m back in the business of keeping an up-to-date blog , here is a post describing in more detail the research I worked on during my stay in Japan. Of course the best, and unabridged version can be read here , or the slides from my talk here.
 
But in short, the work I did with the Osuka-Ishikawa Robotics Laboratory was on passive dynamic locomotion, and more specifically with what is being called the Phase Transition Phenomenon. As I described briefly in a previous post, the idea behind passive dynamic locomotion is that machines can be created which ‘walk’ passively; ie without the standard array of sensors/actuators that are typically required for this sort of task. Through clever mechanical design the control is implied in the physical structure and thus it is said that the system utilizes morphological computation to control motion. Of course these robots must be placed on an incline such that their decent down the slope allows them to regain the energy lost through the inelastic foot collisions. Furthermore, devices of this sort have started to be developed which are able to walk as well as run (running implies a phase of motion in which both feet are off of the ground) depending on the incline angle. Here is a video from another lab which has collaborated on some of this research:
 

 
While in Osaka my work involved setting up a simulation environment (using the Open Dynamics Engine, a free open source C++ rigid body physics engine) in which similar 3-dimensional passive dynamic walking mechanisms were tested and evolved to optimize walking/running ability. Below is an image showing an example body, and the parameters that were evolved.
 

 
Again, more detailed explanation of the procedure and results can be found in the paper linked to above, but the gist of it is that a Genetic Algorithm was employed utilizing a handcrafted tailored fitness function, 70% crossover, 25% mutation, 10% mutation amount, a population size of 256 and Stochastic Universal Selection to maintain a high level of genetic diversity. On my desktop PC 150 generations of evolution took ~12 hours, which certainly put a damper on the number of variants I could test given the limited amount time I was Osaka working on this… At any rate I still found that the GA was effective in creating machines that were increasingly able to walk/run below are a few graphs showing the course of the evolution.  

 
Below is some video showing the initial randomness of population0 compared to population150′s ability to take several steps before falling over. Although stable walking/running motion was never achieved, I still think the results are pretty interesting. In the paper/slides I talk about how things like a better fitness function, more generations of evolution, a faster program (or supercomputer), careful introduction of additional a priori knowledge , a different incline angle or body configuration could have improved this. I am not currently working on developing this any further, but I found the study to be quite interesting and would definitely consider taking it [or something similar] up again in the future.  
 

Morphology Evolution of a Passive Dynamic Walking Machine from Z R on Vimeo.

Contact

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Email:
Phone: 805.876.4867
Resume: (Updated version coming soon!)

     

Fork in the blog

Oye!

New paper – Judo Hoko!!1
Yep thats my excuse for not writing to my own blog in like ever…

Not to mention the 1.5hour plus talk on it I had to give (ok maybe it was kinda fun ) but at present I really don’t feel like translating it from ivory tower english to blogish.. maybe someday .. but now id rather be off to bigger and better things …
** side question : does anyone who has written technical papers feel like it destroys your ability to write creatively? maybe i’ve just been around too many robots and have started to assimilate..

anyways,
Forking my Blog!

ok so i created this blog intending for it to be a mostly technical space with posts on my geeky shit, and recently its started to get diluted with info on my Japan travel. Yes all geeks love Japan, but this month Ill be doing serious travel (and not so serious study) and want to use a blog format to keep a daily log of the things i see and places visited. It would be too much to post here.
Also i kinda wanted to give tumblr a try (guilty as charged) it seems like its more fit for a blog with short daily posts , maybe with a few pictures.

in my impatient , not-feeling-like-writing-very-much mood, here is the story:
This is the bike:

This is Japan:

These are the places I want to visit most:
COOL SHIT MAP

Im going to try to keep the tumblr site up to date with comments and pictures; check it out!

PS: sorry if im a bit overzealous with the classless informalities and slang in this post, i feel like i just have to make up for lost time or something

Japan 2! More pics and Lab Work

 
 
I know.. this update is wayyy overdue … I’ll try to make it a good one.
 
So my research here in Japan (the Osuka-Ishikawa Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University) is on passive dynamic locomotion, and more specifically with what is being called the Phase Transition Phenomenon. Although it may seem like blasphemy, these are robots that are generally without the sensors/actuators/other electronics that are normally standard (as fate would have it, this is a Mechanical Engineering lab). However this is actually what makes passive dynamic locomotion pretty damn cool.  Here is a video that helped to inspire much of this research:
 

 
it is of a cat exhibiting three different gait patterns as a treadmill is run at different speeds. The amazing thing is that the cat is decerebrate, leading the big names in the field to believe the entire nonlinear control-feedback mechanism is implicit in the mechanical design. A long term goal of this laboratory is to further develop the control law for these passive dynamic walking/running devices, which could have a pretty big impact on the future of pedal robotics. The idea is that, for both bipedal and quadrupedal locomotion, rigid control of all the actuators is a pretty large computational (as well as efficiency) burden, which , in an underactuated model that takes advantage of carefully designed passive dynamics, can be offloaded to the mechanical structure. The new term I learned for this is Morphological Computation and the idea that a system can be, in a sense, “programmed” to handle complex nonlinear tasks through its mechanical design totally makes up [at least in terms of coolness factor] for the lack of electronics    Also, Here is a video from a different laboratory which has collaborated on some of this research:
 

 
My task will be to run simulations (and possibly machine physical models depending on how much I can get done in a semester) to further explore how passive robots can exhibit this phenomenon.
 
My Sempai (older student labmates) are an incredibly warm, friendly, and tight-knit bunch, and enthusiastic to teach me about Japan as well as learn about the US. Grad students are committed to their lab relationship almost more like family and all-lab outings/events are a regular occurrence- As I am writing this I just realized I still have yet to take a picture with them- Ill have to get on that ASAP!
 
Here are some pictures from around the lab, Ill try to be brief with the descriptions:

 

Basic PDW quadruped with locking spine and adjustable leg length
 

 

a few more passive and quazi-passive dynamic walkers
 

 

One of a series of “rescue robots” in the lab. This one is intended to retrieve an injured person from a hazardous area.
 

 
 
two more rescue robots, MOIRA and MOIRA II, which would (in theory) navigate through rubble after an earthquake or other disaster to locate survivors
 

another rescue bot which could remove large pieces or ruble and debris more carefully than standard excavation equipment
 

although not strictly a rescue robot, this critter is capable of traveling through pipes of variable diameter. Its purpose is to locate a gas leak without [potentially] having to tear up a whole neighborhood.

 

a pretty neat little omiyage I scored while helping clean out one of the other labs- the device (invented by one of the professors here) allows a robot to capture a 360 degree view of its environment (and thus self localize)using only one camera
 
 
There are also some awesomely cool clubs around campus; Below are pictures of the work in progress formula racer (OFRAC) and birdman glider.

I’ll be going back this weekend to help fab the main cowling – although I don’t really have the time, I’m going to try to become a regular member – wayy to cool an opportunity to pass up
 

 

As some may know, I turned 21 here this week! Funny thing is , the drinking age here is 20- (well really as soon as you can reach the buttons on a vending machine..) so its not nearly as big of a deal. I’ll have to put celebrations of lawful belligerence on hold. Not that the Japanese don’t like to drink- oh they like to get their glow on – but more on that another time (maybe).
Anyway, it just so happened that the Japan Open Robot Soccer tournament was held from May 2-4
 


 
As [if its not blatantly obvious] im a bit of an otaku,so this seemed like an ideal way to spend the day. Oh and it was. I’ll let the pictures do the talking:

 

 

 

The Osaka-U robocup team lab a few days before the event
 

 

‘bots being demonstrated at the entrance- one even danced like MJ!
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
A few of the different humanoid competitions

medium sized non-humanoid class
 

Mixed Reality class – miniature robots compete on the virtual field shown(!!)
 

The hosting organization has set a goal of beating the best human players and winning the world cup with a robot team by 2050. And, to put it nicely, Robovie still has a quite a ways to go before bumping Beckham from the podium… However the crowd seemed to acknowledge that coordinated autonomous humanoid soccer is anything but trivial. The atmosphere was incredibly supportive, enthusiastic , and excited to witness a demonstration of a still infant technology. A cool event indeed.
After this, one of my lab mates (who I had gone with) recommended I see Nipponbashi, and boy was I grateful for that recommendation. Suffice to say, this is my new favorite place on the planet.
 
Nipponbashi , sometimes pronounced NiiPWN-BASH, or Den Den Town – which most nearly translates to Electronics Electronics Town, is a sort of wonderland which takes scores of stores for new/used/bargan electronics, electronic hobby, hardware, toys and menga, 24h internet/gaming/comic cafes (with free coffee and icecream on a pay by the hour basis), and girls in cosplay and densely crams them all into an inner city section directly adjacent to the one of the [in]famous nightlife districts.
My kind of town.
 

It was hard to get a good picture with the staircase in the way, but this reads “DASA (with the N crossed out and replaced with a ‘D’) Device and Silicon ware Agency” – Like a big Sparkfun outlet!
 

GOJIRA!!!
 

“I want you to use the force you’ve gathered with in your grasp for the world from now on” … sexy.
 

 

 
 

I know, I know, everybody and their kid sister thinks that their touristy point&shoot sightseeing pics are works of art – so I’ll try not pollute the interweb too much; but here are some sights and other bits of randomness that I think are actually worth sharing:

 

Kyoto!
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

at these temples, you can pay a couple bucks for an old lady to read your fortune – I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
 

retaliation gift in to say “thanks” for the gifts i brought from California. Now the ball is in my court. apparently thankyouforthe-thankyouforthe-thankyou gifts are not uncommon here
 

Umeda
 

enticing?
 

more enticing?
 

 

 

 

 

 

More Umeda
 

Namba
 

Making friends in Namba
 

Language barrier
 

I hope they’re not always crusty and filled with yellow cream
 

wtf?
 

 

Nagisa Ongakusai 2010 – Japanese Ravebot
 

 

 

More Nagisa Ongakusai
 

more wtf?
 

 

 

Super-Position?
 

Apparently Robot dogs do this too..
 

Do you have survive?
 

“Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it”
Sooo badass.
 

They’ve even taken our idea of consumerism to a whole new level!
 

Japan! Initial Thoughts and Photos

I have been in Japan for almost a week now – so I figured it was a good time to post with pictures, first impressions and so forth. For those of you that don’t know, I flew here last Tuesday for a 6 month stay near the border of Suita and Ibaraki city, where I will be doing research in the Osuka Robotics Lab at Osaka University. I was told that I wold be staying in a suburb of the main city of Osaka, however both Suita and Ibaraki make my home city of Santa Barbara look like countryside by comparison!
Anyways, after an 11 hour flight from LAX to NRT things went relatively smoothly through customs and I was able to take a train to the gargantuan Tokyo Station then Musashino city, where I stayed at a hotel next to a Mustache Pub.

The room was pretty much what I expected of a Japanese hotel room; about the size of a large American closet, with enough room for a small bed, TV, dresser, and bathroom (complete with a toilet that warms your butt and squirts your asshole). Down the hall was one of the fabled vending machines, from which ¥300 could produce a cold BEER! Much less notably (but still pretty cool), vending machines in Japan can provide beverages (mainly tea and coffee) warm as well as cold.

I should also note: sorry that this initial batch of pictures are of such shit quality. I came to Japan under the impression that in Japan there would be unique, new cameras , not [yet] available in the US, and they would be cheap! This is almost entirely wrong. Because Japan has become just as much of a wealthy consumerist nation as we are, camera retailers realized that they could charge just as much , and in some cases more, for cameras in Japan than in the US. The fact that the Yen is now beating the Penny, doesn’t exactly help this. There are still a few models that are only available here, but pretty much everything you can get in the states. If you are going to visit Taiwan it is a different story, but for Japan, bring a camera. Despite this, I am still going to get one (possibly two) eventually, but for now I’m stuck with mediocre camera phone shots.

I only had about a day to roam around Tokyo – during which I walked with some friends from Shinjuku station to Roppongi, stopping for food and bouts of Pachinko along the way. We visited the Tokyo Tocho (aka “Tax Tower”) government building observation deck, which had a view that was pretty damn special.

I don’t quite know what to make of Roppongi. Perhaps it is because we were a group of FoB Gajin, or maybe we were just in the wrong spot on a Thursday night.. but anyway, instead of the “active nightlife” we had been promised, we were confronted by a barrage of seedy Nigerian* men attempting to usher us into titty bars. Under different circumstances I probably would have checked out one or two, but if you want to talk about poor choice in advertising medium , I can think of no better example.
*I have no actual way of knowing that these people were Nigerian. As American’s we are taught (mostly through media osmosis) that anything sketchy and African comes from Nigeria.

Suffice to say, we split that scene and found nerdy-redemption behind a sign like the sign below:

Yes, you read correctly; Luda’s Dragon Quest bar. Complete with costumed bartenders, forever-looping 8-bit gameboy background music, and a menu offering “Right Arm Dragon Ham”, “Meat Slime”, and “Dragon Tail Soup”. It. Was. Awesome.



Early the next day we stopped at a big (Target type) department store. Everything was pretty much as I would have expected, except for this:

What apparel for my University is doing half way around the world, I don’t know (they also had Cal State Fullerton of all places…) but I have since seen 3 other [Japanese] people wearing UCSB hoodies. I stopped one of them to tell him I was a student there, and I’m not sure he knew that it was a University.. ha! I think it might be somewhat akin to Americans wearing clothing with Japanese/Chinese characters and words because they look cool – not really knowing what they mean. Definitely a tripp.

Later in the afternoon we took the Tokyo-Osaka Bullet train. With a cruising speed of 300kph this train would keep up with (if not outrun) most Liter-bikes! Not to mention it runs so smoothly you can hardly tell you’re moving.

The Umeda district , Osaka City. I can best describe this as a vast spiderweb of an underground and above ground mall, stretching several miles in all directions surrounding (and containing) the main subway station. There were a number of things I found to be pretty amazing in my initial explorations here, I’ll try to be brief and only list a few.
The first of which is the arcades. ARCADES! There are TONS of these scattered about the prime $$$ real estate in Osaka City. With mostly Pachinko, Krane, and Video games, arcades are wildly popular. From hot chicks to suit-and-tie business men, all demographics are represented – not just nerdy teens like in America. As shown below, a good DDR player will draw a crowd on a street corner. He’s not even looking!

The food. Osaka is known as “Japan’s Kitchen” ; the food so far has been absolutely delicious. This deserves an entire post all unto itself – so I’ll hold off for now.

We stopped by a pet store and saw some very unique animals you would be hard pressed to find in America. Even puppies are very expensive here, although they (as was observed) still like to eat their own shit. Some pictures of the animals are posted below:

We happened to arrive just as the Sakura (cherry) Trees were blooming. This is a big deal over here, for which the celebration is called Hanami, and involves sitting under the Sakura tree and drinking Sake. We joined [literally] thousands of other people celebrating this in an Ibaraki park on Sunday =)

I meet with my Research Supervisor tomorrow, and still have some reading I would like to do, so I’ll cut it off here for now. I’ll do my best to keep this site updated with info on Japan and what I am working with in lab, so stay posted!

First 3d Data Visualization

 

 

As posted on the as posted on the Media Art and Technology page:

 

 

Background:

For the final MAT259 project, students create a 3D interractive data visualization using data collected as part of the Seattle Public Library project (link).

 

Concept:

The idea behind this project was to create a 3 dimensional interractive data visualization which would provide users with an effective and visually pleasing format to explore relationships between different item formats (eg. Book, CD, Magazine), the day of the week, time of day, and duration for which they are checked out.

 

Modes and Operation:

There are several modes, and methods of control which can be accessed by hovering over the "CONTROL" pane in the bottom portion of the screen. A list and brief description follows:

SLIDERS

• zoom – zooms the camera in and out
• opacity – adjusts the opacity of the the graphics displayed
• background – changes the background linearly from back to white
• animation speed – adjusts the speed for animation (when in animation mode)

CHECKBOXES

• spherical – maps plotting from cartesian to spherical coordinates (time of day to θ, day of week to ρ, and checkout duration to radius)
• log – uses logarithmic function to compress checkout duration, and make data more viewable
• animate – animate by interpolating between consecutive check ins
• axis – display x, y, and z axis
• labels – display lables to allow for a more quantative analysis of the data presented
• lines – display lines connecting the dots which represent individual transactions

BUTTONS

• previous – view previous item format
• next – view next item format

 

Acknowledgments:

The UCSB MAT program, Professor George Legrady, T.A. Reza Ali, Ben Fry, and everyone behind the developement of the Processing language as well as the PeasyCam and ControlP5 libraries.