• The juiciest hour of IMU-based autopilots: our latest podcast, with guest Ryan Beall is up!
• VStone’s New Hobby Robots Include Robovie-Nano, Robovie-PC
• USB Soldering Iron Fixes Broken Robots On The Go
• More Robot Shirts To Spend Money On
• The Outback Challenge carnage shots keep coming

• Video: Vstone’s Robovie-PC robot gets Intel Atom inside, becomes world’s most awesome computer
• The Future of Mice (If There Is One) [Microsoft]
• Gesture controlled MIDI from an Arduino
• Homemade R2D2 steampunk junkbot
• Honda U3-X unicycle Segway spawns clones (Video)

Hey guys I just published a couple of good posts that were stuck in purgatory somehow, sorry about the delay.

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.

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9016

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

After a few months of working for real money, I’m back (probably) to cooling my heels and puttering around with my metal friends.

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.

• Chutney jar PCB etch
• Quoth the Raven: hack some more
• Singularity Summit 2009: Just How’s This Thing Gonna Work, Anyways?
• Garage door… packet sniffer
• Create Circuit Board Standoffs from Inexpensive Nylon Tubing [Clever Uses]

…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.

• Video of Airborne Tactical Laser Hitting a Ground Target Is Not Very Satisfying [Military Tech]
• SMD LED matrix
• See through walls via wireless network
• T-Shirt States the Painfully Obvious

Upgrades complete!

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!

Hi all, ausrobotics will be unavailable (and/or possibly broken) for a hopefully short amount of time while we upgrade some of the systems.

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.