T-ReX Tensions Rise

T-ReX tension calibration

We're developing a new version of our climbing robot called T-ReX (Tethered Robot eXplorer).  The plan is to deploy it in a canyon in a newly discovered crater on Victoria Island in the Arctic in the summer of 2015.  The mission will be to teleoperate the robot and build a 3D model of the stratigraphy of the crater that has been exposed in the canyon.  We've completed the mechanical design and here are calibrating the tension sensor so that we can start to implement tension-based control for ascent/descent on near-vertical surfaces.   We'll be deploying the robot on the exterior of our MarsDome to emulate the canyon wall in the near future.

RSS: Ticket to Ride

Last week was the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference, held in Berkeley, California.  Tim presented our latest findings on viewing batch continuous-time trajectory estimation as exactly sparse Gaussian process regression and Jon presented a new sample-based path-planning algorithm, BIT*, that uses heuristics to help guide the search analogously to A* but in continuous spaces.  The dinner on the last night was held at Google headquarters in Mountain View and we had a chance to go for a ride in one of the self-driving cars…very very impressive stuff!

Lab Featured on CBC's Our Toronto

Our lab was featured in a news item on the CBC show, Our Toronto.  The link to the episode is the
following:

      UTIAS Robotics on CBC's Our Toronto

The piece occurs at about 34 minutes into the show.  Thanks to Keith Whelan and Jonathan Castell from the CBC who shot and edited the story together.

Skull Crusher Debut

This past week we had a team testing an improved version of stereo visual teach and repeat on the Mars Emulation Terrain in Montreal, Quebec, with our brand new Grizzly mobile robot, "Skull Crusher".  We taught a 1 km path that was partly on the Mars terrain and partly in the adjacent wooded area.  We were able to repeat this path over a wide variety of lighting conditions 26 times, with 23 of these being 100% autonomous and the others over 99% autonomous.  Results to be submitted to ICRA 2015.  Fun times!

Thriller at CRV

Several members of ASRL are in Montreal this week attending the Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV) and the NSERC Canadian Field Robotics Network (NCFRN) annual field trials.  We had a good year at CRV with Chris Ostafew's paper winning the Best Robotics Paper Award and Chi Hay Tong's PhD thesis garnering an honourable mention for the CIPPRS Doctoral Dissertation Award.  The CRV banquet was held at a wax museum, hence the pic.