I was surprised to see that an article I coauthored was finally published in the latest issue of Robotics and Automation Magazine. It had been so long ago that it took me a while to place the paper -- I guess it takes quite a while for a special issue to get published.

Anyway, the paper can be found here.

Turns out "situatedagent.com" hasn't been taken. Unfortunately "robothor" can be parsed in several more ways than I had originally intended... This is probably for the best.

I've been trying to redo some presentations about the architecture of the Distributed Field Robot Architecture. It seem that we have some interest from several groups regarding actually using it for large robotics projects. So I have been trying to clean the codebase up a little bit (amazing the cruft that develops...) and build some new presentations to explain some of the design elements behind what I have been doing.

I just posted some pictures of the shorty. I built the sub-site with Sandvox, just to play around with the demo.

Wow, Hannah got me the latest issue of Make for Christmas. I've been reading the online blog for a while, but am really impressed with the quality of the print magazine.

Now I am in a deep quandary: too many cool projects, with far, far too little time to play.

Maybe next year...

A while back I submitted a short research outline to the AAAI Fall Symposium. It went over well enough that I have been expanding what I wrote there to continue towards my dissertation. Unfortunately, it did not scale directly; or rather, I need to restructure quite a bit to get it to scale up. So I have fallen to try to mind-map how all the bits and pieces inter-relate. I think that it has worked out rather well.

The mind-map doesn't really translate directly to an outline though. So I fell back on Tinderbox agents to help with this task. First I added a couple of simple attributes: Section and Order. Then we can use an agent to collect all the notes for a section, sorting on the Order attribute:

Since the agent is looking for notes with the section attribute that includes a given tag, we can place a note in multiple sections. The upshot is that I can now shuffle sections around just by changing two attributes and the agents automatically restructure the outline.

The downside is that I can only do this for a single level -- children of agents, but not grandchildren.

We just finished a site visit from the Department of Homeland Security. We teamed with seven other universities and submitted a proposal to be the fifth DHS Center of Excellence. We'd be focusing on preparedness for and response to high consequence events. We've seen quite a bit of this recently, with mudslides, hurricanes and other natural disasters, as well as the human-generated events of recent history. We've had a lot of experience from the response side and we are teaming with some really brilliant researchers at the other universities, so I think we are well positioned for this proposal. I hope the site visitors thought the same.

I was not presenting or anything -- we hosted the event, so I and the other grad students have been preparing for this since we found out about the visit, and have been scrambling this week to make sure the event went as smoothly as possible. For us this meant making sure the A/V equipment was set up correctly, copying slides, assembling binders, doing last-minute fact-checking, and so on.

It was also very nice to finally put some faces to some names of people I was aware of via publications and reputation. Jeff Bradshaw from IHMC was also in -- we've worked together a bit over the past year or so -- but we barely had time to say hello and chat for a few minutes. The work that I am doing for my PhD ties in with work his interests and I wanted to have a chance to talk over some of it with him. Guess email will have to do...

So after the first half of the week being 12-16 hour days, it was nice to relax and recover a bit today. Unfortunately I got to deal with administrative hassles today -- like trying to figure out why I couldn't access my health insurance account to print this year's id card and why I won't get paid for August until September. Grrr....

I've seen a few people try this, but with limited results -- mainly because they were just piling books and boxes under their monitor until they could stand up. But I would imagine and actual workstation might work pretty well. I do notice that I need to get up an move around quite a bit to keep comfortable during the day. For me this usually means a hike across campus to get coffee and work the kinks and soreness out. Maybe when (if!) we move into the new building I can talk the powers-that-be into a standing setup.

Anyone had experiences trying this?