Yesterday, 14 September 2016, Daphne Karreman from the UT successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “Beyond R2D2: The design of nonverbal interaction behavior optimised for robot-specific morphologies“.
One of the members of the PhD graduation committee was unable to attend in person but participated via Skype.
During the party that evening – with a little help from her colleagues – Daphne took us on a guided tour down memory lane. Video-messages of congratulations went sent by the FROG partners.
The FROG consortium will be at the Royal Alcázar in Seville from 17 till 21 November 2014.
We have been busy finishing our reports and now the EU representative and two independent reviewers (both researchers with a lot of experience with robots) will come to see if we have done our work properly.
This is a very serious event – somewhere between a tough audit and an excellent masterclass for the researchers.
FROG will be put through its paces … Looking for interested visitors!
How about this for an emblem? It looks great on the FROG polos.
FROG polo, modelled by Paulo
The emblem printed on the polos is actually a reversed version of the docking target. It is a set of ArUco markers that just happen to say FROG – though it probably took Fernando Caballero quite some time to find them. UPO uses this ArUco marker to align the FROG to its charger during the docking procedure.
Several posters have been made for presentations about the FROG project. Most of these are hidden away as links in the Publication references so it seemed like a good idea to collect them here.
The UT Campus robot is having some problems at the Hannover Messe. On the first day it drove around until lunchtime but now protoFROG is at a standstill. This is an outdoor robot with a lot of traction power and the loose-laid carpet is causing the motors to overheat during rotation. Although, by the look of it there is not always that much room to manoeuvre, anyway.
The FROG robot was defined to run outdoors, specifically for the EU project in the Lisbon Zoo and in the Royal Alcázar in Sevilla. As the robot must not only navigate the various terrains at these sites but also be able to turn on the spot the project has been having some difficulties with their choice of tires. What would you choose for a 100 kilo robot that has to handle clean-swept tarmac and paving, either of which may later be strewn with olive stones from the trees. This is the terrain in the Lisbon zoo – and the robots mission also includes some inclines and ramps. Then move the same robot to Sevilla where it has to go from neat paved courtyards onto tiled or marble floors.
And in the past two weeks, protoFROG has had to cope with gravel strewn tarmac, TV studios, and now, loose-laid carpet. That’s a lot to deal with for a prototype.
All this week João Freire from IDMind has been working on the protoFROG Campus robot here at the University of Twente. His colleagues, Carlos Marques and André Almeida can be seen in the laptop screen. They were working from Lisbon via Skype to get the content that was prepared by the Marketing & Communications department of the university for the Royal opening of the Gallery.
We have just heard from IDMind that the Campus robot (aka protoFROG) is all ready to be shipped to the Netherlands where it will take part in a very special ceremony. A few days later it will travel on to the Hannover Messe.
protoFROG is actually the UT Campus robot. It is a prototype of the FROG robot with demos of some of the functionalities that are being developed in the FROG project.
The protoFROG will be at the Hannover Messe on the stand from Monday 7 April to Wednesday 9 April.
A collaborative project under the FP7-ICT-2011.2.1 Cognitive Systems and Robotics (a), (d) area of activity.
