By Cliff Thompson

(email: clifftrobot@home.net)

2 - July - 1997

SFRSA President Kevin Fahl noted:

• SEATTLE ROBOTICS SOCIETY (SRS) principle Bill Harrison is offing a free SUMO Rink, has a number of DC SLIDERs made up, and has also come up with a new "Marvin SUMO Base Kit". Additionally, SRS will be running an informal Mini-SUMO Contest Aug. 2^nd in Seattle.

• A FIREFIGHTING ROBOT CONTEST in Connecticut is seeking to establish regional contests. The aim of the event is to locate and extinguish a maze candle. A $25 video of the event is available by sending a check or money order to Jake Mendelssohn, 190 Mohegan Dr., West Hartford, CT 06117. SFRSA Vice President Ed Severinghaus noted he would contact the group concerning the video.

• The joint EXPLORATORIUM-SFRSA 12^th ANNUAL ROBOTICS COMPETITION AND EXHIBITION (ARCE) will occur Sunday, Sept. 21^st,1997 from check-in/startup time of 11am/1pm ‘till 4pm. Kevin put out a call for volunteers and was successful in conscripting members Jackie Santos and Ron Brown.

• Talks with EXPLORATORIUM Technical Curator Larry Shaw have revealed that a lot of new construction projects are getting underway at the Museum. As a result the SFRSA Internet Robot Project will be delayed. The new projected completion date for the project is in time for the Sept. ’98 ARCE. Kevin mentioned this might actually work out for the better by providing more time to 1^st get through this year’s ARCE, then focus on a more general Internet Robot design.

SFRSA Newsletter Editor Win Williams noted he has landed a job with a robotics company. The Berkeley, CA firm, called ENDOROBOTICS, is one of the new breed of high-tech "academic technology transfer" startups beginning to appear. Run by a University of California at Berkeley Professor and two grad students, the company aims to get University technology into the marketplace. Win will be working on two exciting project technologies that the company is developing. The first is a miniature finger-sized surgical robot that is a 7 degree-of-freedom, pitch/yaw joint gripper system. The system excels at small incremental movement operable by an IMMERSION SYSTEMS brand joystick, and utilizes motors that are both servo and hydraulic. The second project involves building tiny machines utilizing IC circuit fabrication techniques, (...wow, does this ever suggest the robot evolutionary species "decibot...centibot...millibot...microbot...nanobot"!). Congratulation s, Win, what a cool gig!

Member Jackie Santos mentioned he was building a "chaotic oscillator from odd-valued capacitors" and had heard of a business with items of interest to the roboticist called the "Small Parts Company".

I had a few items of interest:

• I mentioned I’d visited a toy store and spotted a new ROBOTIX kit called "Volcano Explorer". The kit is billed as being "...based on the NASA-Ames robot ‘Dante’ ...", the tethered walking robot that explored the Alaska Aleutian Range volcano Mt. Spurr in July 1994.

• The May/June issue of the Artificial Intelligence magazine PC AI contained an announcement of a GENETIC PROGRAMMING 1997 (GP-97) CONFERENCE held July 13-16 at Stanford University. Genetic Programming aims to drive computer programs to automatically evolve the best solutions to problems, via the genetic algorithm (evolve in the direction of best test results over many generations of random code mutations). One of the Conference’s Special Program Chairs was titled ARTIFICIAL LIFE AND EVOLUTIONARY ROBOTICS. Further information can be had at the Conference’s Web Site at http://www.genetic-programming.org/ which contains a link for "Ordering the GP-97 proceedings book".

• I recirculated a copy of the fan email letter from German Roboticist Gero von Randow, who praises our Newsletter ROBOTS! and quotes it in his new German book on robotics called ROBOTER. As luck would have it, and unbeknownst to me, my wife arranged for a friend from Germany, en route to San Francisco for a vacation, to pickup a copy of the book as a gift. What a great surprise to receive the book, especially since my wife had located and marked the SFRSA and related references in a Chapter 1 section entitled "Robotersumo und Atomhockey". The citation includes references to SFRSA, ROBOTS!, the 10^th ARCE and a description of the event that includes mention of contestants Carlo Bertocchini and Norman Maxwell. A few other SFRSA-related references are found in the book’s Index and even I am cited in the Bibliography. The Bibliography itself is a remarkable collection of robotics references, and includes some truly astonishing citations, including, for example, a submission to the "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society" entitled "The Practical Requirements for Building a Conscious Robot". The book is a beautifully produced hardcover work with cool cover art and graphics and even a fancy silk place-marker string built into the binding. The book is printed in Germany and published by Rowohlt, ISBN 3 498 05744 8.

1. Lay the book ROBOTER, open to the appropriate pages, on the HP ScanJet scanner and scan in the pages as graphic images.
1. Use XEROX PAGIS PRO 97 Optical Character Recognition software with Foreign Language Pack installed to convert the scanned pages into editable text, and invoke the Language Pack to handle the German alphabet.
1. Use EASY TRANSLATOR software with "German-to-English" selected to translate the German into English.
1. Run a TEXT-To-SPEECH Utility on what survived from the numerous conversions and translations, and read the result using a synthesized computer voice.

• Tomorrow my wife and I will be flying to Pasadena, home of the NASA-JPL MARS PATHFINDER and PLANETARY SOCIETY’S PLANETFEST Event. We will be spending the July 4^th weekend at the Pasadena Convention Center, where NASA SELECT TELEVISION will be broadcasting direct from the JPL Pathfinder Mission Control Center. Attendees will share in the excitement as the Pathfinder Spacecraft, Lander Base Station and Sojourner Robotic Rover all transmit their status and video signals direct to the Control Center’s computer screens, live from The Red Planet!

SFRSA Vice President Ed Severinghaus brought in and demonstrated his 68HC11 Development System. Though the system drives Ed’s other project, the "Body Synth Muscle Music" product, Ed set it up tonight to drive a 2X40 Alpha Display. The system plugs into a PC and has a built-in Forth Interpreter. A breakdown of the system’s circuitry follows, as shown in the photo below:

Member Bob Thille, also a member of HOMEBREW ROBOTICS CLUB (HBRC), announced he has started building a robot under the auspices and guidance of a new Special Interest Group (SIG) formed by HBRC to help members build robots. The group recently bought up a bunch of economically priced Base Platform Motor and Gear Box units, which units had earlier been announced at a recent SFRSA Meeting and reported in this Newsletter. Bob brought in his work-in-progress, which features a Base Platform fashioned from a mobile cart purchased from Orchard Supply Hardware. The next step for the SIG members is to come up with custom H-Bridges and work with a Canadian firm to create the circuit boards. An economic goal of the project is to keep the cost of the robot, including computer and power supply, to under $100. The new SIG and it’s projects are described on the HBRC Web Site at http://www.augiedoggie.com/HBRC/sig.html.

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