Welcome to the Robotics community

// Robotics at CommunityOne and JavaOne

Robots again were prominent at JavaOne!

We had a number of contributions to the RoboHACC collaborative coding challenge in the java.net community corner in the JavaOne pavilion. You can still participate now - start your solution in the Greenfoot simulator - all you need is a Java-capable PC. at JavaOne you were able to direct one or more Sun SPOT - equipped TrackBots through a maze.

Also check out BOF-6620: Robot Fusion: Mobile Robots and Sun™ SPOTs Collaborate to Hunt Humans, and TS-5925 A City-Driving Robotic Car Named Tommy Jr. There was a presentation on university-level educational robots at the CommunityOne Day May 5 at 16:00, Session S297127. Throughout the week there were mini-talks, demos, and other activities in the Robotics area of the Java.net Community Corner in the exhibit pavilion.

Sentilla had a show special on their Perk wireless sensor developer kit. The show phone - a Sony Ericsson K850i - has a three-axis accelerometer, Bluetooth, and great graphics, video, and still image capability. The LiveScribe Java-programmable pen (sounds silly until you try it and then you see what a cool idea it is) could be used in robotic path planning. Various people in the robotics community purchased one or more of these devices and will be exploring their use with robots.

// Mobile & Embedded Developer Days Wrapup

Here's a page with links to videos, blogs, photos, slideware and more from the MEDD conference in January 2008.

// Code Commits of Note

2008 Mar 05: The TrackBotCode is greatly improved. The TrackBot Greenfoot simulator now includes three different maze generators (in the MazeWorld class).

TrackBot demo code in the TrackBotCode incubator project. This includes demo code shown at the the Jan 2008 MEDD conference. There is also a commit in the SunSPOT-trackbot project area - the code from the JavaOne HOL 7230.

SunSPOT projects are committed in the SunSPOT Robotics subproject incubator area. There are also some SPOT projects in the main incubator.

Etching - as seen at JavaOne 2007
This program takes an image and turns it into a vector list for an outline drawing. It was originally used to drive the ABB robot demo at JavaOne 2007. This IRB 340 robot is the fastest in its class with 10G acceleration and 150 pick cycles per minute. It is used for tasks such as sorting croissants and muffins as in this video. Here is a photo.

leRCoS - LEGO Remote Control System
eRCoS is the result of a thesis project. It is working fine on RCX and I'd like to extend it for the NTX brick in order to take advance of Bluetooth communication system!

Jvex-Robotics
JVEX-robotics is a project to interface the VEX Robotics System controller to Java single board computers. The goal is to free the Java host from low level device management responsibilities by delegating these tasks to the VEX hardware. The result is that Java can easily be used with the VEX kit, which is a great prototyping environment. Featured in BOF-0509 at JavaOne 2006 SFO.

Robotics Application Framework
RSCL provides a framework to develop applications to simulate and control a mobile robot. It has been used successfully with vastly different medium sized (~150 lb) autonomous ground vehicles.