[Robokick-info] First version of control software released, hardware modification instructions will follow

[Johannes K. <jk...@pa...>]

RoboKick - Modifying RoboSapiens toy-robots to play soccer

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This text was created on June 2nd 2005 by Johannes Knabe
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Content

  1. on this project
  2. necessary robot modifications
  3. folder content of this release

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1.
    A project of the University of Osnabrueck, Germany

This is the very first release of our project. Still, the
software already worked fine at the RoboCup German Open
2005 (http://www.ais.fraunhofer.de/GO/2005/).
You can find the project homepage with more infos, videos
and pics at http://amy.informatik.uos.de/autorob/

People involved -
Students: Martin Andrew Cavangh, Sven Kerkling,
Johannes Knabe, Hauke Strasdat, Ewgeni Wolowik
Project supervised by:
Roland Hafner, Sascha Lange, Martin Lauer,
Martin Riedmiller
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2.
Note that this package does not contain instructions on
how to modify your RoboSapiens. A detailed step by step
instruction with pictures will follow soon.
Of course you should be very careful when modifying any
hardware and we are in no way liable!
Actually the modifications are not too hard to do as you
only have to cut the head of, making room for the PDA.
Be careful not to destroy the infrared sensor when doing
so. The infrared sensor will later be attached to the
IR sender of your PDA. The PDA needs a camera in order to
sense its world. We used a wide angle FlyCam, but as long
as you get some libraries to fetch images from the camera
you can use any you like.
Our control software sends the IR signals currently simply
by faking clicks on an external remote control program
running on the PDA at the same time. We used Ultramote, a
commercial program (but demo for free), which "learns"
the commands of the RoboSapien remote control easily.
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3.
/JavaNetwork: The java front-end for network controlling
              your otherwise autonomous robots (start,
              stop, role/job)
/logplayer:   The control software can record videos along
              with the log messages during a game. As it
              is very convenient to watch these on the PDA
              this phyton player allows to playback those
              files on a larger screen. There is a
              windows .exe included which is just the
              phyton code compiled to make it run on nun
              Unix machines.
/Config:      Very important to have a look at those simple
              configuration files as they for example
              detemine the role/job of an robot in absence
              of network control (on the PDA these files
              should be in the same directory as the .exe)
/Libs:        Contains camera libraries - so if you are not
              using flycam you should put the libns for
              your cam here
Lots of comments have been included in the source code!
More instructions, i.e. on calibration, will follow in
another release with a step-by-step guide.