NASA Robotics Competition

[aolofsson]

I am wondering if the Parallella couldn't be a "secret weapon" for teams interested in this major crowd sourcing effort by NASA?

--Announcement below---
Registration is now open for teams wishing to compete in the $1.495 million robotics competition known as the Sample Return Robot Challenge, sponsored by NASA and managed by Worcester Polytechnic Institute of Worcester, MA. Registration for the competition will close on January 7, 2014 with late registration available until March 15, 2014. The competition will be held June 11-13, 2014.
For information about the Sample Return Robot Challenge rules, requirements, and how to register, visit:

edit: fixed link

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/august/t ... g_Sdm08mSo

"The objective of the competition is to encourage innovations in automatic navigation and robotic manipulator technologies that NASA could incorporate into future missions," said Michael Gazarik, NASA's associate administrator for space technology in Washington. "Innovations stemming from this challenge may improve NASA's capability to explore an asteroid or Mars, and advance robotic technology for use in industries and applications here on Earth."

To win, a team must demonstrate a fully autonomous robot that can seek out samples and return them to a designated point within a set time period. Robots will be required to navigate over unknown terrain, around obstacles, and in varied lighting conditions without human control, or use of GPS, or other terrestrial navigation aids.

This is a Centennial Challenge in which NASA provides the prize purse for technological achievements. The challenge is extended to individuals, groups and companies. Unlike most contracts or grants, awards will be made only after solutions are demonstrated successfully. Since the program's inception in 2005, NASA's Centennial Challenges has awarded more than $6 million to 15 different competition-winning teams through 24 events. Competitors have included private companies, citizen inventors and academia working outside the traditional aerospace industry.

The Sample Return Robot Challenge is part of the Centennial Challenges Program within NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate, which is innovating, developing, testing and flying hardware for use in NASA's future missions. For more information about NASA's investment in space technology, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/spacetech

[stealthpaladin]

I am game for being on a team building mini recon bots =)

After seeing how Arduino enthusiasts went after running bots via NodeJS, I've worked out an architecture of intercommunicating mechanical or compute components (or even data components like XML). This based on an framework for computing across many environments. If interested, I would be very pleased to cooperate implementing this project and to donate a licensed copy of the framework to the project.

Now I'm only talking about the higher level stuff here, I know my Linux environment quite well. If folks are able to write up individual processing features, we can use this to tie them all together across different mechanics physical and virtual.



As for the actual work of detection, I think the Parallella is pretty well inclined for robotics. When you look at most boards used in robotics, it's not very common to see much in the way of processing going on. Surely in a contest like this we'll see lots of GPUs/APUs/FPGAs/special purpose ARM setups and who knows what else.

One great thing about this board is the different processors (not cores) available - each having their own layers of sensitivity/time/resolution. At the same time each has a different style of ingesting, processing and reporting data. Given that such a multi-purpose robot will have subsystems with widely different tendencies, you can pick the best processor for the particular job and get very large wins in both development time, power/data efficiency and straight usefulness.


Alas I have not yet actually USED an epiphany so I can only comment so far. However theorizing about it's mechanics I'd say a good first example of this feature would be:

- Epiphany is simultaneously handling visuals with ints, audio with floats using binary standing wave interference patterns to compare arbitrary natural waveforms
- FPGA is running a passive triggerable systems such as motive force in a certain direction and keeping proper tension at three angles (for mini support poles)
- ARM is hosting interprocess communication via simple protocols. Capable of marshaling DMA and streaming between specific devices with small amount of work.
- Analog unit watching EMF ? Seismic activity? not sure exactly what that thing is capable of at this point.

[Gravis]

[stealthpaladin]

[stealthpaladin]

Quick note on the float subject, basically I start by using the value of an unsigned int as a ratio to it's maximum 'all bits to 1' value.
you can essentially get a customized and very swift version of float's ability to jump magnitude and express ratios by defining various mask operators.

For instance the ability to modulo any number by any number within 4-16 cycles is possible by quickly sorting out it's affinity to a power-of-two exponent and applying an offset.
Divide by multiply is also very easy using this by changing magnitude correctly before applying a ratio.

These concepts are used in a signal processing library I've written in C++ and also used to implement a "spectrum" data primitive in some other languages.
I've had a few posts about similar things that you've responded to so I wanted to mention that it's just something I work on and enjoy porting to different architectures. At the same time it's got a number of novel uses.

[Gravis]

[stealthpaladin]

[Gravis]

[stealthpaladin]

[shr]