crazy camera

For the first time in my PhD, I am in at uni on a Sunday to do work. It took 7 months, but here I am. Obviously not something I want to make a habbit of, but another deadline is looming, and the weather is pretty crap anyway.

The work I am doing is actually pretty interesting. After about 12 months of just writing about stuff I've already done, I am actually starting to do new stuff. The most exciting thing is that I have just gained access to our research labs latest robot, officially to be called "NECTA" (unofficially called burpbot), which has been specifically built for the research that I will be doing in my PhD. I won't go into the details, except to say that I am interested in mimicking the navigational strategies of insects (particularly bees). If you really wanna know, you can read all about it here.

Apart from a new robot, I also have access to a funky new pair of cameras. These cameras are not your average, run of the mill digital cameras though. Each one has a viewing field 190 degrees (so it can, in fact, see behind itself!). The idea is to have a pair of these cameras mounted on the robot, facing forward but each significantly angled away from the direction of motion (i.e. like a bees eyes). The cameras will also be mounted on a lift platform, so that we can move them up and down. The robot itself has what we call omni-directional wheels, which essentially means it can move in any direction (not just forward and back like a car, but in any direction, like a shopping trolley). Maybe its just easier to show a photo:

This is the base drive system of the robot. Obviously other stuff goes on top of this:


Combining this motion, and the up and down motion of the camera allows us to move the camera in any 3 dimensional direction, so we can make the camera fly like a bee :)

The robot has been designed and built by Luke Cole, who is involved in a number of robotics projects for ANU, CSIRO among other personal projects.

Anyway, enough boring detail. I have just spent my entire Sunday afternoon getting my program code to work with the new cameras. I still have a long way to go, but I can now at least take happy snaps with the new camera .. like these:





If only they gave PhD's for stupid photos!