Downlink: Robot Reality and more

Downlink is our new category dedicated to random useful robotics links from around the web.

We believe that not only will augmented reality be useful for robots, but it will be more useful for robots than it is for humans. From Beyond the Beyond we have a few interesting links about rebuilding reality to suit robots. This post on a robot readable world is very interesting, as this design fiction on domestic robots. Something like this combined with a feature based SLAM and AR Wallpaper may be useful for making this fiction into reality.

Sponsorships are now available for the Open Hardware Summit.

If your robot keeps resetting or having strange problems only when it tries to drive several motors at once, you might want to read up on the discharge rating for batteries. Unexpected problems may occur when a real battery no longer operates as an ideal battery.

Free AI Robotics course at Stanford being offered online this fall.

New mini Robo-One size robot hands.


Here is a great video featuring Garratt and the Bilibots, which sounds like a pretty good name for an electro-country band.

Mmmm, PR2 baked cookies.

Some of you may want to sharpen your grant writing pencil for some of the $70 million in funding available as part of the National Robotics Initiative. That is $70 for every robot Foxconn plans to deploy in the next 3 years.

I am buying an airline ticket if they build a Zaku statue. Also, an excellent new humanoid robot from RT Corp.


CVFH


"calibrate multiple RGBD cameras"

Special thanks to Radu and rest of the PCL team for their hard work making some our work abstractly easier.

If you haven't seen the 'Robots for Humanity' video it is pretty awesome, though I'm not sure I would let a robot shave me.


However, this video is just amazing.

Also, round 3 of the ROS Documentation Contest is closing soon, so send in your entry for awesome robotics t-shirts. Previous winners can be found here.