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OWL hilft Japan

Die Deutsch-Japanische Gesellschaft Bielefeld e.V. hat für die Opfer der Katastrophe in Japan Spendenkonten eingerichtet. Der Erlös geht zu 100% an das Rote Kreuz in Japan. Die Konten sind

Konto: 44185965 *
BLZ: 48050161 *
Sparkasse Bielefeld

Konto: 7608466 *
BLZ: 48040035 *
Commerzbank Bielefeld

Kennwort: OWL hilft Japan

* Die Angaben sind ohne Gewähr, ich bitte darum auf der Seite der DJG nachzusehen!

 

BIRON searching his apartment

Another nice video of the robot BIRON, this time he is searching his environment (actually it is HIS apartment!). This was part of the master thesis of Leon Ziegler, which I supervised. Enjoy:

 

The ReSAI android project

The ReSAI android project is part of the master thesis of Andreas Kipp who I am currently supervising. The idea is simple but not that easy to implement: We want to look into the system at runtime without iterfering with the system and for some situations we want to be able to "help" the robot, e.g. when it got stuck somewhere. To cut a long story short, please check out the video:

 

Starbucks in Bielefeld

Das Gerücht als solches kommt seit Jahren immer mal wieder auf, aber wie die nw-news ja bereits Mitte August berichtet hatte, kann ich mit einem Foto bestätigen, was in der Uni durch die Flure geistert: Starbucks kommt nach Bielefeld!

Barista Rumors

 

Sintel - The Durian Open Movie Project

Sintel - The Durian Open Movie Project was released online today! This is the third "Blender Movie" and it looks awesome - but you should have a look for yourself:

 

PR2 - now on sale!

Finally! Willow Garage announced the pricing of their open-source robot platform PR2: 400 000$.

Robot Power

 

Tiling windows - as seen on windows?

"Ubuntu is nice but what really is missing is this cool aligning windows feature from Windows 7."
Have you ever heard that sentence while wondering why this feature actually is missing in Ubuntu? Well the answer to this is because it is available and as you may have guessed it is a lot more configurable than this "drag the window with the mouse"-feature...

 

ToBI and the Shopping Mall

There have been some milestones at this years RoboCup - at least in the @HOME league. One of them was that the robots had to do one of the tasks in a real world scenario, a real shop at a shopping mall (TOYS'R'US).
Anybody who has been to such a shop knows just how colorful they are so finding objects for robots was a really hard task there...

 

Flobi is not a typo for ToBI...

Puh - IEEE baby. The hard work of some of my colleagues is getting some major attention lately: Flobi, the anthropomorphic head of Bielefeld is featured on IEEE Spectrum and Andrea Thomaz from the Georgia Institute of Technology also picked up the Bielefeld efforts to overcome the Uncanny Valley.

 

ToBI error messages a.k.a. wtf

Sometimes when you are working with these so called "computers" you are wondering what it wants to tell you - especially when time is strapped for coding. I will share with you some of the error messages our beloved robot shared with us:

  • most certainly suboptimal
  • is your bash clean?
  • warning: dereferencing type-punned pointer will break strict-aliasing rules
  • invalid operation java
  • spell-checking failed: error invoking 'spell'
  • 500 Error a.k.a. Something Broke
  • error: ‘33’ cannot be used as a function