The Intelligent Robot Laboratory (Roboken) and some other labs from the Department of Intelligent Interaction Technologies held their Open Lab day on Saturday 10th May, coinciding with Tsukuba Festival.
There were two robots in particular that intertested me...one was from my lab. It was a small differentially driven robot with a laser range finder that detected a human in front of it and followed it autonomously...if one walks away from the robot, it commences it`s human-following behaviour and if the person walks towards it, the robot backs up...although its electronics and behavior was elementary, the robot looked quite cool executing this human tracking behaviour. It was also robust enough to follow just a single person most of the time even if a second person came in its way.However, the response time of the laser range finder was 0.1seconds so if one steps away from the robots quicky, it loses track of the human. Here are some pics and vids.
Later I went to the festival at Tsukuba Center, with Ronit, where there were food stalls from various countries. I had a chicken kebab from an Iranian stall. Unfortunately, it rained all day long so we couldn`t stay there for long.
The next day, Sunday 11th May, Roboken lab held its annual BBQ. It has become somewhat of a tradition of Roboken to have its BBQ annually, around end of spring time. This year the plan was to go to Hitachi but due to the rain, we went to Yukarinomori instead. This is quite near the University. Yuta sensei explained to me that he had observed that students worked indoors most of the time, in a closed environment and so he initiated the idea to take the entire lab members on excursions, for a break away from the lab. The Roboken members had also gone for a 6 hour hike to some mountain during the Golden Week but I had gone to Tokyo the same day.
The BBQ event was quite fun as after lunch, we (boys and girls) played soccer on a muddy field and got ourseleves thourougly dirty.
There were two robots in particular that intertested me...one was from my lab. It was a small differentially driven robot with a laser range finder that detected a human in front of it and followed it autonomously...if one walks away from the robot, it commences it`s human-following behaviour and if the person walks towards it, the robot backs up...although its electronics and behavior was elementary, the robot looked quite cool executing this human tracking behaviour. It was also robust enough to follow just a single person most of the time even if a second person came in its way.However, the response time of the laser range finder was 0.1seconds so if one steps away from the robots quicky, it loses track of the human. Here are some pics and vids.
Later I went to the festival at Tsukuba Center, with Ronit, where there were food stalls from various countries. I had a chicken kebab from an Iranian stall. Unfortunately, it rained all day long so we couldn`t stay there for long.
The next day, Sunday 11th May, Roboken lab held its annual BBQ. It has become somewhat of a tradition of Roboken to have its BBQ annually, around end of spring time. This year the plan was to go to Hitachi but due to the rain, we went to Yukarinomori instead. This is quite near the University. Yuta sensei explained to me that he had observed that students worked indoors most of the time, in a closed environment and so he initiated the idea to take the entire lab members on excursions, for a break away from the lab. The Roboken members had also gone for a 6 hour hike to some mountain during the Golden Week but I had gone to Tokyo the same day.
The BBQ event was quite fun as after lunch, we (boys and girls) played soccer on a muddy field and got ourseleves thourougly dirty.
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