Slider Archives - Digital Urban

Pigeon Sim: Fly Round London as a Pigeon

Andy — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 10:21:30 +0000

Researchers here in CASA, University College London, from the TALISMAN node of the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) are working on urban simulations and procedural modelling. As part of the public outreach side of the work, they have created a Pigeon Simulator where you can fly like a pigeon exploring different parts of London.

The simulator uses Microsoft Kinect sensor which tracks body movement and gestures and converts them into movements through Google Earth 3D web plugin – see the movie below for how to fly the PigeonSim:

The aim of the work is to use innovative new methods to communicate the city as a data feed, with live feeds powered by CASA’s CityDashboard visualised in Google Earth.
A nod and a flap goes to http://mackerron.com/home/ who is an honorary RA in CASA…

The post Pigeon Sim: Fly Round London as a Pigeon appeared first on Digital Urban.

Personal Robots on the Horizon: The Robot Operating System

Andy — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 14:28:36 +0000

We are over in Pittsburgh for Ubicomp 2012, kicking off the 5 day conference is Steve Cousins, President and CEO of Willow Garage, a robotics company that acts a a catalyst to create a new industry in personal robotics by creating open source software and state-of-the-art robot hardware.
Robots are not close to being ubiquitous, but we are getting closer to a day when personal robots will be commonplace. Robotic technologies, with either sensing or actuation, are rapidly being adopted as advances in computation allow us to do more with them. Robots are following a path that parallels that of computing. Mainframe computers and industrial robot arms are both large, expensive devices that operate behind locked doors on behalf of an organization. Like personal computers, personal robots are used directly by individuals to increase their effectiveness in whatever they do.
Steve notes that Personal Robotics is a new industry powered by open source software with off the shelf components.
The Person Robot 1 in 2007 provided a first glimpse of home personal robots:

Moving on to the Person Robot 2 was introduced in 2010, small scale and high cost but 40 of the units are currently in use in a range of applications, the progress from 1-2 points to the developments most notably version 2 is autonomous:

The main issue is software rather than hardware, core to this is the development of a Robot Operating System (ROS). Below is the Turtlebot, basically a Roomba linked to a Kinect and running ROS, we really like this one:

As Steve notes these developments prompt thoughts of the forthcoming film Robot and Frank:

In the near future being able to ‘manipulate the world’ from a distance – ie the PR1 will be more common, cost is still an issue but smaller off the shelf hardware, combined with ROS and open source is bringing personal robots into the foreseeable tech horizon.

The post Personal Robots on the Horizon: The Robot Operating System appeared first on Digital Urban.

Using Oyster Card journeys to understand how, why and where we travel in London

Andy — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 10:25:47 +0000

Researchers from UCL have analysed millions of Oyster Card journeys in a bid to understand how, why and where we travel in London.

Professor Michael Batty (UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis) and Dr Soong Kang (UCL Management Science and Innovation) applied the techniques of statistical physics to their mountain of raw data.

The pair joined forces with a computational social scientist and a physicist, both based in Paris, to explore patterns of commuting by tube into central London:

They used Transport for London’s database of 11 million records taken over one week from the Oyster Card electronic ticketing system.

The post Using Oyster Card journeys to understand how, why and where we travel in London appeared first on Digital Urban.