This coming weekend we’ll be making a new push to bring the orbs to the next level with communication, choreography, and autonomy!

In the mean time, you can see SWARM at several events in the coming weeks.

We’ll be at the After Hours party at the Google IO Developer Conference this Wednesday, May 27th.

This upcoming weekend we’ll be at Maker Faire in San Mateo May 30 & 31st.

and then Robogames in San Francisco, June 12-14! 

Phew!
Orbots for the future!
Lee for SWARM

After taking in feedback from our entire group, I am pleased to write that the SWARM Project is now completely open source.

We had previously put restrictions on commercial re-use of our project.

The exact terms of the license can be found here:
http://wiki.orbswarm.com/index.php?title=License

Last week the orbs were found dancing and flirting with the laptops at the Jaunty Jackalope Ubuntu Linux Release party! (Each orb runs ARM embedded Debian, pretty nerdy, huh?)

This Thursday 4-30-09 a cadre of orbs will be migrating to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco for a “Nightlife” event! We’ll be there along with the Robots from RoboGames! (bartending bots are so cool)

Be there or be … round.

The orbs will be rolling out to Makers Faire in San Mateo. Don’t go to see us, go to see Maker Faire with your family! It’s really a tremendous event. 

You know what, you -should- go to Maker Faire to see orbs!

And I didn’t even mention SWARM at Subzero in San Jose June 1….  or more orbage at Robogames in San Francisco June 12-14! Oh wait, I just did. :-)

Here’s a bit more about the Jaunty Jackalope release party!

The San Francisco Jaunty Jackalope release party was held on Thursday April 23 and was by all accounts a great success.  It was quite well attended; I would roughly estimate several dozen people or 50-60.  We held the party in conjunction with a group of technically inclined electronic musicians on the Mp3Death.US Creative Commons netlabel, and they were responsible for a good portion of the draw.  The event was billed variously as “Ubuntu Linux Release Party featuring Linux Music & Robots”, or “Jens and the Jaunty Jackalope” (Jens being one of the performers).  “Robots” was a reference to the Orb SWARM project, which brought two of its machines to perform; they both ran embedded Debian on a TS-7800 board.

Our contact with Mp3Death.US was through its founder Jordan Gray, who presented the previous month at Bay Area Linux Users Group.  Jordan makes all of his music on Linux; his main tools are the open source MIXXX and LittleGPTracker applications, and he performs using two Linux-based devices: an EeePC netbook (running Ubuntu) and Game Park GP2X handheld.  Jordan graciously agreed to perform at the event, and in addition enlisted several of his friends to perform on the bill.

They had been planning to throw a birthday party for a couple of their DJs, so we agreed to combine parties.  We also recruited interim_descriptor, author of the open source “dvj” music visualization software.  INTD ran projections on the wall for the his own set as well as the other artists’.

The Orb SWARM team demonstrated one of their robots rolling around the floor inside its shell (2 1/2 ft diameter aluminum sphere cage).  The orb interacted with partygoers, operated by a SWARM crewman with remote control.  In addition to moving around the floor it flashed patterns on a matrix of multicolored LEDs and produced a variety of sounds.  Besides the shelled orb, we set up a naked robot on a table where people could see its inner workings.  It was connected by crossover cable to a laptop, and we ran a telnet session into the robot to demonstrate the Debian command line of the embedded ARM processor inside.

About half the party space was taken up by a laptop area where people were doing various things on Linux.  Grant Bowman performed a fresh Linux install on an HP Netbook, using the Jaunty Jackalope Ubuntu Netbook Remix bootable USB stick he made earlier that day.  We also gave away a Jaunty Jackalope CD on request.  A number of other interesting Linux devices were present, including an OLPC XO laptop and a phone-sized Nokia device running Debian (brought by a member of Noisebridge, the local hacking space).

A good time was had by all and we hope to repeat our success in October for Karmic Koala.

tonight mike and i spent some quality time with orb 2.  it went well.   

in the attached image, the input targets are black dots, the generated smooth path is in red, and the measured orb path is in green.  more images can be found here:

    http://wiki.orbswarm.com/index.php?title=AutomonyImages

no simulation here, this is the real thing. :)

    -trebor

Hey SWARMSTERS,

the truck will be on the road in a few minutes!  Congratulations on all your hard work; we have six working orbs, four fully outfitted for autonomy, two autonomous sequences which can be activated directly by joystick, and a good start at the mother node integration which we can build on at the playa!

You rock, swarm rocks, and open your minds to where we can go from here….

tonight, Niladri and I started the dispatcher program, detached the ethernet cable, and removed our stuff to a respectable distance from orb 1 on the soccer field.  It then spent a minute figuring out the initial bias on its sensors, and started rolling.  It turned left and followed the line of the mid-field circle, and corrected a bit.  It never strayed more than 2-3m from the line, we never turned the joystick on, and after four complete circles, we got tired of walking along with it and turned it off.
(image in SVN)

I’m sure we could have left it going until the batteries wore down.

We are standing at the edge of great things.  Most of them will happen eventually, but we have a special opportunity to make some of them happen in a little over a week.  How far we get between now and then is up to all of us.  Of course, the more we can nail down the platform, the more time we will have to develop the art.

There is a lot to do.  Please help to make it happen!

Followup from Niladri

It was pretty awesome to see the orb do circles. I thought it was the absinthe. On a field with no markings and with a slightly bigger circle I bet it will be hard to tell the 2-3 m deviation.  Although an orb autonomously following a circle on a field is a fine demonstration of our technical skills it’s not that interesting in terms of art.   The unique window and ~40k spectators  that BM offers will probably won’t come by soon. And these people will remember us by what we put out there on the playa and not what we do later in the shop. So ye autonomy people please please make the whole thing happen. Feel free to pass on non-autonomy work to the rest of us. As Jon remarked yesterday there has been a lot of stack popping lately and it’s wonderful. Yay we are now artists again.

–Niladri.

A shoutout from Michael

One of the most important factors in going from the random paths we had a couple weeks ago to our current semblance of path following is changing to the U-blox LEA-5H GPS modules.  These outperform anything else we’ve seen at the sub $300 price point, but they are not available from the manufacturer with an integrated antenna.  Fortunately, the folks at PPZUAV have created an awesome PCB for the modules with an integrated antenna, which provides on board voltage regulation and comm out via RS-232, TTL serial, and usb.  They’ve been extremely helpful, and I’d recommend them happily!

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