Canesta Equinox 3-D Sensor

Canesta has announced a new 3-D image sensor that could have applications in machine vision and robotics. What's it do? According to Canesta, the Equinox chip resolves a scene into pixels, as does an ordinary camera chip, but instead of simply providing the brightness of each pixel, Equinox additionally provides the distance from each picture element to the sensor chip. On the downside, the device only provides a 64x64 pixel image and only MS-based, proprietary development software is available at present. Canesta claims it will be a "low-cost" sensor but there's no word yet on a price. At present the sensor is only available as part of a development kit for $7,500. For more technical details, see the developement platform data sheet (PDF format). You can also read more about the sensor in CNET and EE Times articles.

Ingres Million Dollar Challenge, Technology Solutions

Ingres Million Dollar Challenge, Technology Solutions

CA is offering cash awards with a total purse of $1 million to the members of the open source community that develop applications to convert, transform and migrate data from the selected databases to the Ingres database. Applications will be reviewed and selected by a panel of judges from CA and the open source community, and the winners will be announced during caworldsm 2005 in Orlando, Florida.

(ed: wanna be a millionaire? can it be done? wat the hell r they talking abt?)

Amplified Intelligence

Amplified Intelligence

A new Astrobiology Magazine interview with Ken Ford of the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition discusses robotics, AI, and whether better machines will make humans smarter or just more dependent on the machines. Researchers at the institute think of AI as a computational prosthesis for the human brain that could extend our intellectual capacities in the same way eyeglasses extend our visual capacity.

storm in a nutshell

the storm did come... virile and torrentious rains screamed down with reckless abandon on the rooftop of our car. heaven and hell were belting it out in another dimension... and the grass was suffering down below. the road snaked away into the unseen horizon in front of us. the miles rolled away beneath the newly shod car. weeping is such sweet sorrow.

awe inspiring lightining. and benjamin franklin turning in his grave. arcs of photons racing through the sky, charged up with the emotions of billions upon billions of bio mass on this 3rd rock from the Sol. does my chair think? does my table dream?

unrated thots pass through my mind... flickering and wavering. time spent in the grocery store, flitting from here to there, sitting, standing, walking, staring. a nod and swipe of a credit card. a push and roll of the shopping cart. a step and a swing of the doors. a glance and a storm. a butterfly flaps its wings and a string of random prime numbers click their way thru infinity. a passing car splashes muddy water into my face. blink. gone.

yes, a storm did come.

Phil, Sophie, and other short stories...

there was a lil boy once, named phil. he was a melancholic boy. given over to malaise. one dat wuld generally be called in popular terms as a "lost cause". he would spend days brooding over nothingness. a brown study enveloped him.
then there was a lil gurl called sophie. bubbly, cheerful, frothing over with the ingredients of a joyous broth. a perfect caricature of joi de vivre. they used to go to the same school.
their teachers name was life. calm and serene; she was the embodiment of tranquility and peace. she was a silent observer of phil n sophie; their guide and mentor. she would often wonder about the world divide between phil and sophie. she befriended the two. she would sit for hours and talk about wat she was all about.
(directors input: cut to 20 years in the future) phil and sophie have grown up. both have matured... or at least tried to. but life never did change. age had not touched her. the passing years had not blemished her countenance. the vagaries of existence had not disturbed her composure. she showed them a glass.. the prism of life. light culd change its appearance depending on which end you looked at. it could at once be holistic... or defracted. but in any form... it was beautiful. phil and sophie heard all this and went back to their own worlds.

moral of the story: i dont know wat philosophy is all abt. i dont know wat crap i write. life is a stranger to me. and i totally believe in cogito ergo sum.

Vs

there is no defeat here. hence, no victory. just senseless banter dat occupies the days of r lives. D'ou venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Ou allons-nous? where do we come from? wat r we doing here? where r we going? the basic questions of origin, purpose and destiny dat overshadow r existence. these repartees r but moments of transmogrification for r souls, as they indulge in the perpetual quest for the question to the answer. 42...! and mice...!

may the forks be w/ u all.

i, me and the myselves

i am a geek. i wuld like to point out dat i meant Geek in all its most derrogatory forms. as in the 'Greek' - 'r' = Geek thing. i am a Geek. and i am proud of it. sad part is i am not The Geek. but miles to go before i sleep... et al.

i stand in defiance of humanity or ne of its characteristics. i submit as exhibit A, the green tinge of my skin. exhibit B, big wobbly ears!!! i also come in cuddly and furry varieties. go ahead... knock urself out!

as fer being a marian... dat was just a co-incidence... mars was in position w/ venus at dat time. the said position is numbered as 69 in the Kamasutra and described as "Out of this world!!!". so its not my fault or want. but even so... a marian i am... and a full blooded one... if a marian can have ne blood to speak of after 14 years of blood curdling and blood sucking.

meerut... in the middle of nowhere

a small town. proximity to delhi. population just over 10 lakhs. western UP. memories of growing up. jaats and loud booming voices. small streets. packed markets. hindus and muslims. birds and bees. an attempt to describe.

a gr8 place was the cantt bus stand. nothing gr8 abt it... but it became special by the dint of long hours spent there waiting fer a roadways bus to delhi ISBT. it offered a most interesting vantage point on humanity and its idiosyncracies. the concoction of ppl, bordering on the weird, and the cacophony of daily life, bordering on the rhapsodic.... it proffered a queer but interesting insight into the machinations of life... vis-a-vis day to day existence.

but meerut did evoke a feeling of lazy pathos around it. it was like a painting done in exquisite colors... which the painter never got around to completing... and somehow ppl just forgot abt it. it still hangs as an unfinished tapestry on the canvas of history.

yeah, those r my thots on meerut.

Workshop

Workshop

Robosphere 2004, a workshop on Self-Sustaining Robotic Systems, will be held at NASA Ames Research Center Nov 9-10 2004. This is the second workshop in this area held at NASA Ames. Its purpose is the advancement of a Robotic Systems Science for long term robotic presence and human robotic interaction on planetary surfaces and in space systems. Self-sustaining robotic systems offer the possibility of increasing scientific returns, decreasing exploration costs and reducing chances of mission failures.

Robotics and the meaning of life

The Open University in the UK, has found a practical use for Asimov's robot stories. They're being used as part of a robotics class, called Robotics and the Meaning of Life: a practical guide to things that think. The Laws of Robotics are considered in terms of real control architectures such as subsumption and on the practicality of using them to design safe robots. Asimov's Laws are just one part of a larger course that reviews the history and state of the art in robotics from R.U.R. and the Turing Test to Moore's law. Students get hands-on experience using a Lego Mindstorms compatible robotics simulator called OU-Robotlab. Required reading for the course includes Asimov's I, Robot, and Ruth Aylett's Robots: Bringing Intelligent Machines to Life.

About the Songs and Poems in the Lord of the Rings

About the Songs and Poems in the Lord of the Rings

This page is a commentary on the songs and poems in J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. It includes all material in English that is three lines or more in length (excluding only "Snowmane's Epitaph" in "The Battle of the Pelennor Fields," which is two lines long). The songs and poems are in order of their first appearance.

Fancy me! 

EyeSim - Mobile Robot Simulator

EyeSim - Mobile Robot Simulator

EyeSim - EyeBot Simulator
The EyeBot simulator EyeSim is a multiple mobile robot simulator that allows experimenting with the same unchanged EyeBot programs that run on the real robots. EyeSim includes simulation of the robot's driving actuators (differential steering), as well as all robot sensors, including:
On-board vision (synthetic generated images)
Infra-red sensors
Bumpers
Odometry

let there be light...

...and there was light. after months of fighting hard against the blogging urge... here i am. but i figured this is a neat way to keep track of my research online. i suppose that is what it will primarily be used for.

of course, inane thoughts, insane ideas, and other random rumblings of my cerebral convolutions might end up here as well.