I’ve been at the conference on robotics and automation for five days now and all I can say is: “Did you know robots can play football?!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLKKbz2mNyo

I stopped by the Robotis booth at the exhibition during lunch one day and they showed me the above video. Robotis makes the Darwin OP robots that make up the American team in the above video. Not only are they adorable, they’re also frighteningly smart. Their goal-blocking behaviors are pretty funny too.

On Wednesday I got to hear a talk from Peter Hart on making Shakey, one of the first autonomous mobile robots. Colin shares Shakey’s basic physical design and I think I can learn a lot from how Shakey’s software was organized. Shakey used a hierarchical system where one program controls low level functions like moving and sensing and separate programs handle motion planning, map building and localization. It seems like a good way to organize Colin’s functions. That’s a long way off though. I’m still busy writing Colin’s motor control library.

On Friday there were two sessions on Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLaM). I made sure to attend both of them since my ultimate goal for Colin is to program him for SLaM.

It seems a lot of implementations of SLaM rely on vision via Microsoft Kinect sensors. Those are out of my league for the moment; I have no idea how to program for them and Colin does not have the power to run any such program anyway. Laser rangefinders and LiDAR are also popular and, while I could potentially add one to Colin, they are expensive as hell. I’m still getting some good ideas though. Hopefully I can implement them on a robot that uses cheap ultrasonic and touch sensors instead of fancy RGB+D cameras.

Saturday was my favorite day at the conference by far. I attended an all-day workshop on building a career in robotics research called “Becoming a Robot Guru.” The speakers and panelists got me very excited about working toward a career in robotics. I was encouraged to learn that one doesn’t have to follow the traditional academic career path to be a robotics researcher. I have been worried lately that it may be too late for me to start a PhD in computer science or robotics, but many of the speakers on Saturday took more than a decade to start their PhD after they completed their bachelor’s degree. That gives me hope that a career in research is still an option for me. I’m starting my master’s degree this fall. All I really have to do is keep working at it and I’ll get there eventually.