RoadNarrows had an exhibit table at the IEEE Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) conference in San Diego from October 30 to November 1st. Approximately 1000 roboticists attend this academic conference from around the world. RoadNarrows had the first public demonstration in the U.S. of two new products: the CogniMem Silicon Neural Network ASICs manufactured by Recognetics, and the Brain-and-Sensor Pack for legged robots, developed by RoadNarrows.
The CogniMem Silicon Neural Network Image Recognition Board, manufactured by Recognetics, was setup to recognize visitors and small objects on-the-fly by training only a few neurons as needed. The CogniMem Neural Network chips and boards are now available for ordering. The interest from attendees of the conference was overwhelming, and it promises to be an excellent product for intelligent robotics.
RoadNarrows was able to give researchers an early preview of the Brain-and-Sensor Pack which is part of a National Science Foundation funded SBIR/STTR project in cooperation with Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. A Kondo KHR-2HV was used to demonstrate the system. It consisted of a KorebotLE linux stack interfaced to specially-designed I2C processor boards laden with sensors mounted in an industrial-designed "sole" housing attached to the robot's feet. The data from the foot sensors were streamed over an 802.11b network via the KorebotLE to a laptop running visualization software showing the values of the sensors and a computed center-of-weight on each foot. There was a lot of enthusiasm with RoadNarrows' work. RoadNarrows-designed small 3-axis I2C Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) for humanoid robots also was of interest to roboticists attending the conference.
Khepera III, the latest professional mobile robot from K-Team, S.A. of Switzerland was demonstrated and received very good attention from researchers doing multi-robot systems. The Khepera III (K3) is a small, wheeled robot with the KorebotLE linux stack as an option. The KorebotLE is an embedded linux board that can support many peripherals, for example, compact flash, USB devices, I2C, analog and digital I/O. RoadNarrows is the exclusive U.S. distributor of K-Team's products.
The epuck, designed by the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and manufactured by GCTronic of Switzerland was demonstrated as an advanced educational or research robot. It is a small hockey-puck size robot with many features that is very popular for swarm robotic research and education.
The POB-Bot robot with POB-Eye camera was also shown. The out-of-the box vision recognition system using the POB-Eye was very impressive to robot educators. One of the features that robot educators are demanding in a robot platform is cross-compatibility with other popular robot platforms. The POB-Bridge is a new board developed by POB-Technology of France that provides an interface to Lego(R) Mindstorm(TM) systems. POB-Technology's POB-Bot and POB-Eye are very popular with robot educators around the world.
Mobile Robots at IROS07
CogniMem Image Recognition Board at IROS07
RoadNarrows Feet on Kondo Humanoid at IROS07
IROS07 - The RoadNarrows Team