ferrouswheel » fun

The weird and wonderful world of UAVs

Joel — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:13:53 +0000

Recently, my long time friend and colleague Ben Goertzel came to Hong Kong to help advise on the AI project I’m working on. He also happened to bring a “Parrot” quadcopter (warning, this link autoplays a youtube video), which is an awesome wifi controlled toy that has quad rotors. Not much different to a radio-controlled helicopter except it’s much cheaper and also more stable.

There are some vague plans to do autonomous control of these devices using vision processing and voice recognition. Although the actual hardware used maybe different since quadcopter drones have gone hobbyist and you can build your own from scratch.

I will now leave you with two youtube videos of them in action…

Using the Kinect hacked onto a drone to allow it to build a 3d model of the environment and do it’s own path finding:

Other’s have used motion capture to allow tracking of a ball which is then juggled between two quadcopters with trampolines:

Off to the land of Oz

Joel — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 02:08:59 +0000

I’m not a particular regular updater with this particular blog (too many things have been demanding my attention lately), but I thought I’d drop a note to say I’ll be off the radar for a week or so…

I’ll be attending Burning man. I’m immensely looking forward to this as this is the first year in several that’s actually been feasible for me to get there from New Zealand. I’ll be with an Australian theme camp called Straya that a friend of mine put me in contact with, and who’ll also be there.

As well as Burning man, I plan to hang out in Washington D.C with Ben to talk about our work on OpenCog. Then I’ll stay in San Francisco for 5-6 weeks (end of Sep till start of Nov) to attend the Singularity Summit followed by the CogDev Workshop (an OpenCog coding jam, details to be finalised, but likely to be just after the Summit).

If you’ll be at any of these events and want to chat, drop me a line

What I did with my weekend (and Monday)

Joel — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 03:08:47 +0000

A whole group of friends from Wellington and a couple from Australia came to Christchurch recently. For snowboarding, and for our alternate event to Burning Man…. Melting Man. Helix DJed at Nitrate, with some of the WDC there to support him on the Saturday. We travelled to Flock Hill station on Sunday, and on Monday I mountain biked like a crazy man (on the Broken Hill track). Monday evening was building a snowman, dancing on a hill, and having good times (more about it from Kathy and Tatjna).