Robots¶
Here are the robots I have worked with, in chronological order.
Lego Mindstorm¶
I built these two cute guys using the Lego Mindstorm kit during my Master Thesis. The one on the right sports an FPGA board to do multiplexing for a few sensors. Also it had a great double differential and mechanical odometry. I programmed it in C, cross-compiled, linked statically against a mini- kernel and dumped on a tiny processor. Looking back now it was a lot of fun!
Cicerobot (B21 and PeopleBot)¶
Below are the robots I used during my Ph.D thesis.
This was the first incarnation of Cicerobot, a museum tour guide robot in the Archaeological Museum of Agrigento. It is an old glorious B21. Below it’s a more advanced PeopleBot, also featured in the videos page (together with its cousin Robotanic).
Robotanic (Pioneer P3-AT)¶
This is an outdoor Pioneer 3-AT with differential GPS and stereo camera. It guided tourists in a 
area in the Botanical Garden of Palermo.
Foyle (Scitos G5)¶
Below are the robots I used during my time at the ISRC.
This is an extremely well-built and durable Shunk G5 from Metralabs. It had brushes underneath that could pick-up electricity from a powered floor. It had a broken eye joint that made it look very cute towards the end of the video showing the BBC visit to our lab. In the background are my friends and colleagues, and to the left was my messy desk (sniff..).
ShadowRobot Hand¶
This is an impressive 5-fingered hand that we mounted over a 5DOF manipulator which in turn was mounted over a Schunk G5 base. I used it when playing around with emergent behaviors. A video showing it with three fingers only (and me poking it into grasping) is available here.
Schunk Powercube 7DOF Arm¶
I actually don’t have a picture of the Schunk arm alone, but here is a famliy portrait with its mates sitting on the powered floor. We used the robot on the right (plus a Kinect Camera) to get the 4th place in the ROS 3D Contest with our application Person Tracking and Reconstruction from a Mobile Base with a 7 DOF Manipulator.
PR2¶
The excitement of receiving a PR2 was evident in this video. After not too long we put it to work, and what’s better than solving a Rubik’s cube?
Brett (PR2)¶
Change of country, same robot. Here BRETT (Berkeley robot for the execution of tedious tasks) is showcasing two Syntouch Biotac haptics sensors to “get a feeling of objects”. I’ve used it for the language grounding application.
