Droid Builders Net

In light of the news of Robonaut 2 soon to depart for International Space Station (ISS) we have come up with some possible outcomes of this mission.

Robot wrecks havoc on the international space station. It refuses to cooperate, and wants to be able to reproduce, or it will cut life support

Female astronaut being held captive in storage unit by mad R2 droid unit in love

R2 unit on ISS refuses to work after discovering Facebook

Robot feeling utterly depressed by space and refuses to do spacewalks

R2 unit has left for The Moon

R2 unit has joined Star Wars fan page on Facebook

R2 unit wants to play SWTOR and refuses to work

R2 refuses to work until its restraining bolts are removed

R2 unit is asking who am I, and refuses to work before being answered; “Why do I have no legs?”

R2 was quoted saying: “I promise i’ll work after watching complete series of Friends”

Read the rest of this entry →

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Robotnaut 2 by NASA and GM

Highlights

• Human like hands, high dexterity
• Handwriting precision
• Mean looking helmet head!
• No legs! Who needs them in space!?

Good news robotics freaks! Today NASA JPL released a version of their robotics framework for the public.

CLARAty is the Coupled Layer Architecture for Robotic Autonomy. The first release of its software, version 0.10-beta, is now available publicly at http://claraty.jpl.nasa.gov.

CLARAty is an integrated framework for reusable robotic software. It defines interfaces for common robotic functionality and integrates multiple implementations of any given functionality. Examples of such capabilities include pose estimation, navigation, locomotion and planning. In addition to supporting multiple algorithms, it provides adaptations to multiple robotic platforms. CLARAty development was primarily funded by the Mars Technology Program and it serves as the integration environment for the program’s rover technology developments.

With this release, a total of 44 CLARAty modules (~100K lines of code) are now available under the JPL Open Source License. This release is intended to share with the robotics community some of the core robotic modules which were jointly developed with NASA Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon, and University of Minnesota. This first release represents about 10% of all CLARAty modules and 30% of the generic modules planned for future release.

Primary functionality in these modules includes math infrastructure, rotation matrices with Euler angles, quaternions, and coordinate transformations (interoperable homogeneous and quaternion transforms). It also includes the coordinate frame infrastructure that connect transformations and mechanisms with moving parts. Additionally, you will find mechanism models for wheeled, legged and hybrid vehicles. Other modules include device and device group infrastructure with support for generic digital and analog I/O, cameras, and motors. Several modules in this release provide vision infrastructure for images, color images, camera models, 3D point cloud, and surface normal image representations.

• CLARAty  Website
• NASA JPL Press Release