FXPAL Blog

“Cloth Grasp Point Detection based on Multiple-view Geometric Cues with Application to Robotic Towel Folding.” Just watch it:

This is a PR2 robot from Willow Garage, being used in a project led by Berkeley grad student Jeremy Maitlin-Shepard. (The paper on the folding application is here.) The PR2 and its cousin the Texai have visited us at FXPAL; we’re hoping to improve our acquaintance soon (stay tuned!).

The very interesting approach taken by the roboticists at Willow Garage is to encourage the development of the robotics community through open source development. They also loan their hardware to other research labs on a case-by-case basis, again to encourage development on their ROS platform.

What is ROS? From the Willow Garage site:

ROS, Willow Garage’s software platform, stands for two things: Robot Operating System, a loose analogy to a computer operating system, and Robot Open Source. All of the software in development at Willow Garage is released under a BSD license at code.ros.org/gf/projects/ros. It is completely open source and free for others to use, change and commercialize upon — our primary goal is to enable code reuse in robotics research and development. Willow Garage is strongly committed to developing open source and reusable software. With the help of an international robotics community, we’ve also released all of the software we are building on ROS at code.ros.org in the “ros-pkg” and “wg-ros-pkg” projects.

For the language geeks out there, this month’s SDForum Emerging Technology SIG looks interesting.

A panel of experts faces off over the relative strengths and weaknesses of three emerging languages – Clojure, Scala, and Go - and one “benchmark” language - Ruby. Details:

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Sorry for being AWOP (away without posts).   We upgraded the underlying OS on this server, and in the process we made the machine non-bootable.  It was booting from a logical volume, which is illogical.  And after the upgrade, not a valid drive.   And since this isn’t “mission critical”, we didn’t have a hot spare.   So, this is now the backup of Wordpress restored to a wiped-clean and re-installed machine.   I think it is close to back-to-normal.  Never upgrade a machine if you don’t remember exactly how and why it was set up the way it was (random chance or old poor decisions?).  Thanks to my anonymous colleagues for fixing it.

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