Do you look forward to humanity’s bright future, where all people are equal, and world hunger and poverty has been eradicated? Yeah me to.

One day my robot army will encircle the planet, bringing peace and prosperity to all peoples who follow my exact teachings as Supreme Elite Commander. Of course, the problem with robot armies is always control. And what better way to control an army of obedient super soldiers than with your VERY MIND!

A person named Zibri has posted a description of how he connected Milton’s Force Trainer direct brain-to-toy interface to his computer via a MAX3233 chip. The game interface apparently outputs ASCII characters at 57600 Baud making this perfect for hacking and interfacing with other things.

I cannot believe that we now have an easy way to convert basic brainwaves into serial data for so cheap! The seems to be 3.3v native so this would be perfect paired with an XBee to provide long range wireless brain data.

I want to build something that let my computer detect I am annoyed at it.

Check out Zibri’s post here.

I am no longer posting the daily digest on this site. Funnily enough it’s because I think it looks too robotic.

Instead I will go the standard human route and post full posts again. My robot masters would he so ashamed of me, hehe.

I’ll keep an eye out for any others and update the permissions so things should go straight to the front page from now on.

How many people in Sydney would be interested in taking part in an event such as this around the same time?

A recent job involved generating “face recognition” s/w. I.e. not just a matter of locating a human face inside an image (not a difficult task these days with stuff like opencv around), but trying to tell which of the 1000+ people it *could* be pick the one it most likely is.

It turned out that task was not too difficult, either. There is a lot of information in the placment and size (all as detected by my simple s/w) of just eyes, nose and mouth. So much, in fact, it seems the “1000+” can easily be extended to “100,000″ with no significant loss in reliability.

I’ve been tinkering lately with getting the face recog into an embedded device or 2 — since we all want to be able to search or DVD’s for faces of dick cheney, or an image with angelina and bratt in the same frame, or maybe ID those people on that talk show.

Some examples of my recent musing are on my youtube pages, but here’s a brief list:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtIUWYdVoZI&feature=channel_page

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yutPC27ovLs&feature=channel_page

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhYYpZclBww&feature=channel_page

The clips are mostly experiments with RECOGNISING faces, not with tracking them. So things jerk around quite a bit, and the recognition itself is based on each vid frame and is not “smoothed” out. E.g. it can change its mind from frame-to-frame rather than understanding if X was the guy in the image 1/25th sec ago, and there seems to have been not cutaway to a new scene, then the same guy close to that position this time is probably X again.

…or he will rip you limb from limb.

I can’t wait until I am old and can get my arms replaced with these babies.

I thought I would celebrate the successful navigation of the hidden software reef of possible destructing with some long long long overdue robot news.

First off. I am thinking of rewriting Ausrobotics from the ground up. Like the 6 Million Dollar Man, the new site will be stronger, faster and capable of leaping entire buildings in a single, er, leap. I am in the thinking stage at the moment, I have a lot of other stuff on running my new mobile development business (check us out!: http://boostedhuman.com).

Secondly, here are some fresh links:

• New Solar and Fuel Cell powered UAVs stay in the air for months at a time [via BotJunkie]
• This is the guy who i’m gonna hire to build my house [via futurismic]
• Machine Vision: Are we on the brink of a breakthrough? [via ReadWriteWeb]

Hope you are all well!

Thank you for your patience!

[Update]

Everything went perfectly except the forum upgrade which seems to be stuck in some sort of loop! Obviously that is a bit of a major issue.

I have lodged a support ticket with the Simple:Press Forum support and will update you once its been resolved.

Quadruped first steps

Check out Murray’s Quadruped project on GooglePages for all of the info about this project.

Anyway, you should be noticing a definite speed up in the site starting from 5 mins ago. Before I did the transfer it was taking up to 30 seconds to load the site which is totally unnacceptable! Now it is like a normal site again, whoooooo!

Please let me know if anything is broken and I will fix it asap