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Humanoid robots battle in Japanese competition March 26, 2010

Posted by emiliekopp in robot events.
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I spotted this video in an internal email going around at NI. A Japanese robot wrestling competition was covered by the nightly news in China. Looks like the NI logo made it onto the big screen, although I’m not sure how (or if) NI technologies were used in the competition. LabVIEW has been used to program many humanoid robots before though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these robots are powered by the NI software.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

I bet RoMeLa’s DARWIN humanoid robot would have been a formidable opponent in this robot battle. I’ve seen some serious karate moves from him in the past.

RoboCup 2009: Robot Rescue League Team Spotlight February 25, 2010

Posted by emiliekopp in labview robot projects, Uncategorized.
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Get up close and personal with RoboRescue Team FH-Wels, from the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. These students and researchers have an impressive resume of participating and winning in a variety of worldwide robotic competitions.

Their latest success: building an autonomous robot to compete in the 2009 RoboCup Rescue League, a competition where autonomous robots navigate through a small-scale obstacle course of complex, unstructured terrain in search for victims awaiting rescue.

Their white paper is extremely informative, providing a breakdown of the hardware and software design. The team wisely chose commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies for their robot design, including a notebook PC and haptic joystick for the command station, a D-Link router for communications, an NI sb-RIO for the onboard processing, a Hokuyo 2-D laser range finder for mapping, an Xsens IMU for localization, an NI Compact Vision System for image processing, and lots more. To piece it all together, they used LabVIEW for software programming.

One blog post wouldn’t do them justice, so I figured just embed their white paper. It serves as an excellent reference design for anyone building an UGV for search and rescue applications.



And here’s a video of their robot in action: