http://www.educatingsilicon.com Listening for the pitter-patter of tiny metal feet. Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:07:47 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of Willow Garage. So as they get ready to ship their first PR2 robots, here's a gratuitous video of the pre-release testing: [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUlJCREMqho] This second video is a nice overview of what Willow Garage and their open source robotics program is all about: [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyLq4lfBsI0] http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2010/03/10/fun-with-robots/ To my surprise, Google Goggles actually launched last night, not 12 hours after I posted about it yesterday. I've just spent a while playing around  with it on my Android handset. Search times are, as expected, much more than one second, more in the anticipated 5-10 second range. Good to ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2009/12/08/google-goggles-goes-live/ The tubes are a-buzz with some news that Google are working on a mobile visual search system. No surprise there really, but it is interesting to see the current state of their prototype. The info comes from a CNBC documentary called Inside Google. A clip is up on YouTube, and ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2009/12/07/google-visual-search/ I've let this blog go very quiet while I was working on finishing my thesis (done now!). However, today my brother got a helicopter pilot's license, so I though I would mark the occasion by posting some videos showing how his fancy skill might soon be redundant :). Here are ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2009/10/18/autonomous-helicopters/ I'm off to RSS 2009 in Seattle next week to present a new paper on FAB-MAP, our appearance-based navigation system. For the last year I've been hard at work on pushing the scale of the system. Our initial approach from 2007 could handle trajectories about 1km long. This year, we're ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2009/06/18/a-thousand-kilometers-of-appearance-only-slam/ So the visual search story of the day is that Amazon has acquired SnapTell. This is a really natural fit - SnapTell have solid technology, and Amazon are one of the best use cases. Not too surprised to hear the deal has been done - SnapTell has been conspicuously quiet ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2009/06/17/amazon-buys-snaptell/ Congratulations to everyone at Willow Garage for reaching Milestone 2 in the development of the PR2 robot. 26.2 miles of autonomous indoor navigation, including opening eight doors and plugging in to nine power sockets. We've been watching the video in the lab with serious robot envy. Very cool! [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S2dc_B-6Kg] http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2009/06/06/autonomous-marathon/ Writing in this morning's FT, Nassim Nicholas Taleb proposes Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world: 1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2009/04/08/dinosaurs-and-tail-risk/ Today's edition of the New Scientist news feed includes an article about my PhD research. How nice! They called the article 'Chaos filter stops robots getting lost'. This is kind of  a bizarre title - 'chaos filter' seems to be a term of their own invention :).  Still, they mostly ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2009/02/24/fab-map-in-the-news/ I was at a lunch talk today by Nick Bostrom, of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute. The institute has an unusual mandate to consider the really big picture: human extinction risks, truly disruptive technologies such as cognitive enhancement, life extension and brain emulation, and other issues too large for most ... http://www.educatingsilicon.com/2009/02/13/the-really-big-picture/