NASA is working on an UAV to fly above the surface of mars and take high resolution video of the landscape below. The ARES mission will involve a 6.5 meter wingspan UAV that will cruise along 1 mile above the martian surface. The cameras on board are very high resolution, such that, “if there was a candy wrapper on the surface, we could read the name and ingrediants off of it.”

Once the plane reaches the surface of Mars, NASA plans on live streaming the video feed from the plane. That will definitely be something to watch for. No word on how long the plane will remain airborne.

Roborealm has an interesting tutorial on using machine vision for obstacle avoidance in ground-based vehicles. The tutorial shows a series of image processing steps which can be chained together to detect the “highest” point in an image, based on the ground color. Presumably, that highest point is indicative of the best path to take in order to avoid the most obstacles.

The … algorithms will refer to aspects of this images and exploit attributes that are common in obstacle avoidance scenarios. For example, the ground plane assumption states that the robot is placed on a relatively flat ground (i.e. no offroading for these robots!) and that the camera is placed looking relatively straight ahead or slightly down (but not up towards the ceiling).

RoboRealm is a fascinating and powerful tool for exploring machine vision without difficult programming or an in depth knowledge of the field. It is free for personal use and comes with a number of plugins for using it with various robotic kits. If you’re curious about machine vision, it’s worth a look.

After ten yeras, the array of creations made with the LEGO’s Mindstorms kit is pretty impressive. One of the latest things to amaze me is this NXT 3D scanner created by Philo. The device uses several motors and linear actuators to probe the surface of an object and precisely record its shape. The scanner, which can take several hours to map the surface of an (even small) object, uses a sharp needle and and a the light sensor to probe the surface of the object to scan with quite an ingeneous mechanism. Philo details the project and outlines each component on his website. Philo writes,

I am a LDraw parts author, and as such I am always interested to find new ways to model LEGO parts. Many parts have a clear geometric structure and are relatively easy to create, but parts like the frog pictured above (note: it’s the small green blob) have no defined geometric shape and are very difficult to model. I toyed for a while with the idea of a 3D scanner… The solution came with 2008 LEGO Technic sets that include a new part, the linear actuator. These nifty device convert the rotation movement of a motor into a linear movement. Coupled with the high resolution of NXT encoder, I had all the elements to build a 3D scanner, precise enough for my purpose.

There’s a video of the scanner after the jump.

(more…)

A new Terminator Salvation trailer has hit the interwebs. Check it out in all its glory below (it’s pretty spoiler-y, fyi).

Thoughts? I’m honestly pretty skeptical. Sure, it looks nice, but its awful hard to have a coherent, meaningful story when there’s this much pressure to please the fanboys.

If you’re looking for a good story then you owe it to yourself to check out Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.  Now that’s worth watching.

[Via Botropolis]