Partner News from Studica, Robosoft
This partner update includes news from the RDS partners Studica and Robosoft.
Studica News
Studica is a new Robotics partner. They are the North American distributor for Fischertechnik and they are very active in the education community.
Recently Studica ran their Second Annual Virtual Robotics Competition at the Ontario Technical Skills Competitions at RIM Park in Waterloo Ontario. There were 9 teams that participated from all over Ontario, varying in experience from just being introduced to VPL two days earlier, to some teams that delved deep into C# for the past several months. One team in particular wrote their own Sumo Player by stripping out all the ‘state’ implementation of the main control code os the base SumoPlayer and implemented their own, procedural-style code. Another team eliminated the floor sensors code and used only the ImageProcessing to control the Boundary avoidance, while another team used extensive ImageProcessing for the Target object tracking.
As a surprise, the Sumo Ring Object was slightly to reflect a Gray arena rather than a Black one, so some teams needed to make modifications of thresholds to their code. Despite some technical glitches, the Round-Robin matches were completed successfully. A couple of photos are included below from the event.
Robosoft News
The robuBOX-Kompai is an open source package (licensed under LGPL) based on Microsoft Robotic Developer Studio R3. It provides support for Robosoft’s Kompaï R&D robot.
See Kompaï in action at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GciSisi1cMg
The package contains:
- a simulated Kompaï for MRDS simulation engine,
- full hardware support (speed control, laser, ultrasonic, infrared, odometry)
- path following
- mapping, localization and path generation, based on Karto, from SRI
- speech interaction
- a dashboard to monitor and use these functionalities
The robuBOX-Kompai package can be downloaded from the Kompaï Home Page. The user manual is also available online.