University of Canterbury, New Zealand
This video will show you how to create your own LEGO bricks that enclose other LEGO bricks. I used the polyester resin pouring method to create the brick by utilising a silicon based mould. These step by step instructions help you to create your own LEGO brick. This is an ideal present for all your AFOL friends.
Here are some more photos of the models I made:
It was time to improve the performance of this Raspberry C64 Pi computer by adding the official regulated fan to the case. I also added a USB audio adapter to improve the sound quality. With these two inexpensive upgrades, the Raspberry Pi performs much better and the audio quality is much improved.
I will be giving an invited talk at the HumanTech Meetings on December 2nd. This event will be in English with Polish live translations. You can join the meeting for free. The title of my talk will be “Same same but different”. Here is the abstract:
The idea of robots have inspired humans for generations. The Bank of Asia, for example, had commissioned a building that looks like robot to host its headquarters in Bangkok. This profound interest in creating artificial entities is a blessing and a curse for the study of human-robot interaction. On the one hand it almost guarantees a headline in newspapers, but on the other hand it biases all participants in the study. Still, almost all robots that made it out of the research labs and into the market failed. This talk with try to shine some light on why robots are so (un)popular.
The HumanTech event is focusing on “ARE ROBOTS HUMAN TOO? ABOUT HUMAN-INTELLIGENT MACHINE INTERACTION”.
Not so long ago, robots were the subject of sci-fi movies or production lines in some industries. Nowadays, the use of robots in hospitals, hotels or coffee shops has been gradually increasing. All over the world, cases of robot-related anxiety have been noted. Specialists even talk about robophobia – a strong fear of robots.
During the upcoming event in the HumanTech Meetings series, organized by SWPS University’s HumanTech Center for Social and Technological Innovation, two world-renowned scientists, Professor Christoph Bartneck, University of Canterbury, New Zeland, and Professor Agnieszka Wykowska, the Italian Institute of Technology, in Genoa, Italy, will tell us about their own experience of building difficult relations with robots. The meeting will be hosted by Dr. Konrad Maj.
The UC AI Inaugural Conference will take place on 9-10 December 2020.
UC AI is a newly-formed transdisciplinary cluster for artificial intelligence research. UC AI encompasses researchers from UC’s departments and schools of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Mathematics and Statistics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Physics, Psychology, Education, the Humanities and Social Sciences, and the New Zealand Human Interface Technology Laboratory.
UC AI’s Inaugural Conference also provides an opportunity to celebrate Ada Lovelace’s birthday on 10 December. Nearly 200 years ago, Lovelace and Charles Babbage wrote the first programs for a universal digital computer.
The conference is free, but if you are planning to come, please register as soon as possible via the website.
If you would like accommodation in a UC Hall of Residence ($60 per night inclusive of GST for a single room), please make your reservation.
I am working my way through updating our Nao robots and I was able to install the latest version of Choregraphe (2.8.6.23) on a Mac OS X computer that still runs an an older version of the OS (10.13.6 High Sierra). The problem is that the newest version of Choregraphe expects to communicate with the newest version of NAOqi, the operating system of the Nao robots. Problem is again that the Aldebaran online community has been closed and hence you cannot directly download the latest version fo NAOqi.
Softbank Robotics is now offering the Robot Settings app that should allow you to update your Nao robot. The installer even works on Mac OS X 10.15 Catalina. I connected my Nao via a ethernet cable directly to my Mac and was able to connect to it using Robot Settings.
I was able to connect the robot to the internet using Wifi. The problem comes with the next step called “Synchronisation”.
Robot Settings is unable to connect to the “server”. I assume that this would be a server over at Aldebaran or Softbank Robotics. In any case, it is impossible to get beyond this step.
I used the Robot Settings up with our latest Nao V6 and this time it worked. But it does not allow you to update NAOqi, just other apps that you might have downloaded from their App Store. Our Nao V6 does not have the latest version of NAOqi and hence again I am stuck.
You could use Choregraphe to update NAOqi (see screenshot) but this would require that you had already downloaded NAOqi, which is currently impossible.
The last method would be to use the Flasher application and a USB stick to update the robot. But again, you would already need to have the NAOqi image available.
Softbank Robotics, please get your support up and running again. You make it very difficult for us to operate the products you sold us.
