Online Cortex Thoughts on Science and Technology

Two great images from the HiRISE camera!

This is the Phoenix probe parachuting into Mars’ north polar region from orbit with Heimdall Crater in the background.  A larger image can be seen at Astronomy Picture of the Day.

This image shows the Phoenix probe on the ground.

At this point, a camera under Phoenix may have found a hard icy substrate underlying the topsoil (story here).

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

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Posted under Astronomy, Exploration, Mars, Robotics, Software, Space

I recently received a comment on my post on controlling NXT robots with Matlab that pointed me to the RWTH – Mindstorms NXT Toolbox for MATLAB®, which is a public domain Matlab package that enables one to interface with and control LEGO mindstorms.

The RWTH – Mindstorms NXT Toolbox for MATLAB® was developed as a student project in the Institute of Imaging and Computer Vision at RWTH Aachen University in Aachen Germany.  It provides a Matlab interface with the NXT brick that includes Bluetooth communication, sensor interface and motor interface.  It requires a working Matlab license, of course. 

The package is very easy to set up.  It took me less than ten minutes to successfully test the example programs over Bluetooth.

There are some very nice motor features, such as motor synchronization and speed ramp-up and ramp-down.

I have yet to explore how easy it is to modify or extend the code, but it ought to be a straightforward matter.

The package can be downloaded from
http://www.mindstorms.rwth-aachen.de

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

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Posted under Computation, Fun, Intelligent Systems, Lego, NXT, Research, Robotics, Software, Technology

I have just submitted my first Google Gadget.
It is called Bird of the Day, and it simply presents a photo of a new bird species each day. The photo is a public domain image from Wikipedia, and I link back to it so that you can get more information.

Here it is:

You can put it on your iGoogle page by clicking here…

I am going to write a few other versions that will complement my BirdPlanner.com site. The first will be a modification of the above where the user can enter their latitude and longitude to get birds that are present in that locale. That way people can prepare for their birdwatching trips.

I will also try writing one which is a Bird Identification Quiz. It will be a multiple choice quiz. I can vary the difficulty by sampling from birds of the same genus, from the same family, or from the whole set of birds.

This is a fun way for me to become familiar with the computational technology. The google gadget is just an XML file. The tag <Module> identifies it as a Google Gadget.

The remaining XML has three parts:

1. <ModulePrefs>, which encodes the properties of the gadget.
2. <UserPref>, which encodes the user information.
3. <Content>, which encodes the content.

My gadget is pretty straightforward.  There are no User Preferences, so I just have the first and last sections. 

You can look at the xml code here.  You will see that the workhorse of the content section is a php file that emits an html file.  In this case the gadget simply holds a simple web page.

In the future, I will write more details about how all of this works.

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

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Posted under Biology, Birds, Coding, Gadgets, Inventions, Software

CLARAty (Coupled-Layer Architecture for Robotic Autonomy) is a framework for reusable robotics software. It was developed in part by my former colleagues at NASA Ames Research Center in collaboration with Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Minnesota (my alma matter).

They are in the process of making the framework and several modules publicly available. 

Videos of systems using CLARAty can be found here.
Presentations on CLARAty can be found here.
Publications can be found here.

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

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Posted under Computation, Exploration, Intelligent Systems, Robotics, Software, Solutions, Space, Technology

I stumbled on this live traffic monitor called FEEDJIT today while visiting the Church of the Spaghetti Monster…

They also have a map that displays where the traffic is coming from.

Pretty cool, huh?

Kevin Knuth
Albany NY

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Posted under Internet, Inventions, Software, Solutions, Technology