Wednesday 31 August 2011

Robots, junk and 3D


Two students from Rushden Community College and Bishops Stopford Sixth Form, Kettering, have undertaken four week placements with The University of Northampton's School of Science and Technology, by the Nuffield Science Bursaries scheme .


3D modelling
Ben Durrant (Rushden Community College) has been working on 3D modelling and creative design with the NVision team; NVision is a state-of-the-art facility with specialist services to help companies develop and promote their products using the latest 3D modelling and visualisation capabilities, part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

Junkbots

Hayley Stevenson (Bishops Stopford)  has been working with Dr Scott Turner, Senior Lecturer in Computing, and Dr Margaret Bates, Manager of the Centre for Sustainable Wastes Management, on the Junkbots programme. Junkbots is a challenge for schoolchildren to use waste materials to create, and then program, simple robots, and the scheme has reached out to hundreds of children across Northamptonshire. 


As producing several 'robots' from junk, the work culminated in a  lego controlled junkbot  been produced. It is a a walking model from straws and cotton, combined twith two motors from LEGO NXT set and some java code to get it to move. More details can be found at: http://junkbots-hayleystevenson.blogspot.com/2011/08/day-18-my-last-day.html including video of it working.



LEGO arrangement

The walking model
This has new junkbot is very much in-line with the ideas behind the project, combining engineering, waste and computing to produce something new.


For more detail about what Hayley did see her blog (including videos and pictures of her work):  http://junkbots-hayleystevenson.blogspot.com/



Monday 15 August 2011

Junkbots - Nuffield Bursary Placement: Day 16 - Modelling and tying up loose ends!

Junkbots - Nuffield Bursary Placement: Day 16 - Modelling and tying up loose ends!: "Morning! So today I began by Modelling my Programming Insect JunkBot, made from 6 straws and only took 10 minutes to make."

Junkbots - Nuffield Bursary Placement: Day 15 - Designing the Programming Project

taken from: Junkbots - Nuffield Bursary Placement: Day 15 - Designing the Programming Project: "Hi guys! Sorry this post is late! Anyways! On Friday, I designed the insect programming bot, so I basically designed the actual physical p..."

The design is very simple, easy and quick to build, however the programming will be slightly more complex. Here is my design, which shows the different movements as the JunkBot walks:



I also checked through all of my sheets, and they are now all ready for printing when I get the chance!

Saturday 13 August 2011

A Virtual Environment Training System for Microrobot Assisted Haptic Laparoscopic Surgery

Work from the collaboration between Dr Fengda Zhao  (Yanshan University, Qinhuangdao, P.R.China) and Dr Yinghui Zhang (Division of Computing, School of Science and Technology, University of Northampton, UK)  has been published 


Zhao Feng-da, Zhang Ying-hui.


 A Virtual Environment Training System for Microrobot Assisted  Haptic Laparoscopic Surgery.


 Journal of Harbin Institute of Technology(New Series), 2011, vol. 18(Sup.1):161-164








Most of the existing laparoscopic simulations which use simple objects are only for the purpose of the training of laparoscopic surgical skills. We have designed and developed an early prototype of a laparoscopic simulation system in which almost all of the soft tissue organs are modeled as deformable models which can be manipulated using a laparoscopic instrument with haptic feedback. Physics-based modeling is applied to realize collision detection, force rendering and elasticity deformation. A new mechanism to analyze and evaluate the injuries to the soft issues is introduced. Preliminary experimental results show that the simulator can meet the requirement of 1 kHz haptic loop update rate under complex virtual scene.


This collaboration was supported by a Leverhulme Fellowship .

Wednesday 3 August 2011

development of Ad-Hoc Robot Networks

Neeraj Jalan



The dissertation presents the project of integrating and analyzing of communication behaviors into a group of Lego robots, interacting with each other, with the help of wireless communication medium in Bluetooth. The purpose of the work is to create the ad-hoc network of Lego robots, by the use of this wireless technology, and introduce the elements of Behavior Based robotics. The fact that Mindstorms NXT systems (Lego robots) support Bluetooth enabled communication, means these systems can be used as a basis for creating complex, communicating artifact for introducing behaviors in them. The report has also focused on gathering the background information about the NXT system forming a good prototype of robots, and its great flexibility with LeJOS NXJ as programming platform. The result is implementation of developed work, using Lego Mindstorms NXT as robots, and LeJOS NXJ as programming environment. The task was approached with Lego robots fetching the information from environment, and other Lego robots as input; and processing this information to produce an output, to move in a purposive way in a group. It was noticed that implementation of several behaviors to single Lego based ad-hoc network had shortcomings, due to the complexities with the communication technology and limitations of the NXT systems. Thus, more than one Lego based ad-hoc network was implemented to demonstrate the combination of two or behaviors successfully.