Lego mindstorms, little-big robots

For the final project of my computer-science degree at Universidad de Zaragoza, I am developing a complete navigation system for Lego Mindstorm robots. Using all the sensors availible for this kind of robost, my goal is to study how trustly can these robots be.
I used Lejos OS for the robot brick, and I developed a visual application for PCs that using a bluetooth connection can monitor the robot sensors, the position and the speed of the robot. It is also a remote control to the robot, if you don’t want to trust in its artificial intelligence.
It navigates using a preload map, and helped with the camera and the ultrasonics sensor it can update the map with the obstacles it detects. When you send a command with the position you want the robot will go, it calculates the best path to go, and if it detects an obstacle while is moving, it updates the map, recalculates the path and send all information to the control application on the PC by bluetooth. It uses a closed-loop control movement, based on its calculated path on a cell based map.

This is a video of the robot avoiding obstacles and getting into the goal position.

Using a camera, it is also able to follow color objects, like a red ball. And based in the size of what it sees, it open and close a clamp to catch it, here it is a video of a demostration of it.

This robots has a diferncial movement, now I am working in a car-like robot, I will upload more information as soon as possible.

First steps in Caribou keyboard

Caribou is a text entry and UI navigation application being developed as an alternative to the Gnome On-screen Keyboard. The overarching goal for Caribou is to create a usable solution for people whose primary way of accessing a computer is a switch device.

The initial goal is to make an in-place on-screen keyboard suitable for people who can use a mouse but not a hardware keyboard. This on-screen keyboard may also be useful for touch screen or tablet users.

With the funding from the Consorcio Fernando de los Rios from Junta de Andalucia (Spain), Warp is developing improvements to Caribou keyboard like predictive text, spanish layouts or the posibility of use with a switch device.
Warp has an early implementation of a DBUS service that provide prediction to the keyboard (or any application) using Presage prediction library, and using a patch developed by Joaquim Rocha we have a different keyboard layout specified with a JSON file.

This is a little video-demo of what is able to do at the moment.

I will report on progress of the project in the coming days.

Hello co!

Hello all!!!

The aim of this blog is to report my advances and my ideas and my thoughts on various subjects that I like.
I hope to publish many posts but no promises…