ROBOCON Preparation

Wow.... once again... sleeping in carpark... nothing to do in the middle of the night... hence switch on my computer and put some feeling into words. We are working in a "huge, bright and safe" area for robocon preparation, guess what? yeah... faculty's carpark. It is the brightest part of the university in the middle of the night (all lights are switched on) hence the safest, it's the biggest space one can obtain. take a look at these.....


hehe.... the location "not bad" right? good for sleeping.....


The only table available in the area..... and it's not provided, i stole it last year from somewhere....^^


we haven thrown anything away for the past few months, hence our working residues are extremely mountainous.


the "blocks" in use.....

ROBOCON Malaysia 2010

A rather late date for this year Malaysia's robocon competition, 22nd to 27th June 2010. Here we are, with less than one week to the competition which will be held in UKM, everybody is working hard to finish the designs and robots production. Of course i'm not one of them. I'm graduating this year so do not involve in the designs team.

After we won the Robogamez in Uniten last year, it looks like our university will be one of the hot contender for the champion this year in ROBOCON Malaysia. But for those who included UM as one of the few teams to watch, don't worry too much as our preparation has been marred by campus politics, and by politics i'm not only mean those students politics aka small fries, it also involved very complicated relationship in the staffing level as well. Hence, we're definitely not in the position to win anything this year. I'm unfortunate to say that reputations are more important than students' welfares and knowledge for some members in the university. You definitely can't have enough politics in UM, the university that famous with politics, from students politics involved green and blue to some complicated situation which lecturers with only Dr. titles before their names are completely not qualified to solve. Let alone students, that's the beginning of self destruction. the university are weaken by plenty of politics, and it will continue until we have a new generation of research based staffs in UM. We have too much politics oriented staffs and it's not good for a university that aimed to do well in knowledge acquisition.

But nonetheless, i believe we, the students will try our best to compete in the competition, who knows we can spring some surprises. The teams to watch are definitely UTMs, i feel sorry for them last year in the competition for the objections from other universities. They worked really hard and came out with some innovative technology that others can't do. I know really what they have done as i personally was a sensor designer. Hence, to get booed by others was something really not fair to them. Hopefully they can come out stronger and become champion this year.

But no matter how the outcome of the competition this year, we will come back stronger and stronger in the future. 2 of our self-designed and developed innovations are in the pipeline to be ready in the future, namely the fiber optic color sensor and image sensor. Although i've no chance to continue in getting involve in educational sector in the near future, i'm sure students will benefit much from competition as it prepares well for their future.

Explanation of my Thesis

Ever heard about something sounds like image recognition system? well, it's a system that recognizes image to the extend of objects and facial recognition. Honda Asimo is one of the example using facial detection and recognition. What if a series of image recognition systems take place for let say, 30 times per second? Hence, we have a visual recognition system that gives us continuous output for 30fps.

Besides, there is something more. Well, ever heard about sound recognition? yes, you can speak and the words can be recognized by this machine. Exactly, a series of continuous processes will give us an audio recognition system.

However, is there something missing here? yes, of course. We've an audio recognition system, we've a visual recognition system. But, does the machine know where those audio and video come from? is that in front of the machine? or at the back? or left side? or right side? exactly, we need a device that tell us exactly which direction we are looking at. That formed the directional awareness of the combination of gyroscope and accelerometer.



So now, how on earth that we gonna do all of these concurrently. If you put an Intel Core 2 Duo processor inside, you are not gonna able to get 30fps + 44khz audio processing + khz gyro accelero output. Hence, the key lies in the technology of parallel processing. This is where Intel and AMD are heading. The current highest true cores processors are from AMD, 12 cores. so, is 12 cores enough? no, hence what we have here? the answer is CUDA from Nvidia. with hundreds of cores inside, Nvidia able to turn their Graphic cards into something very very useful for scientific calculation, aka supercomputer.

But do we need a so advance system that consume high power carried in a mobile robot? of course not. So what we can do is we steal some concept from Sony in their play station 3. The answer is the custom Integrated circuit design. But i'm not at that level. What to do next? finally i turned to Altera for their Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). The best tools for low power , high bandwidth , parallel processing and fast time to market.

So this so called FPGA will help us in the central processing of all these audio, visual and directional awareness sensors. The objective is to create a complete sensing network that able to behave like human. How is it possible? the answer lies in Artificial neural networks.

my last holiday

That's it. Having graduated from the university a month ago, i'm enjoying the last nonsense holiday in my life. It's the first time in years i've been submerging in the sea of holiday and relaxation. All will begin in July when i will have no more holiday, no more easy life, but promised to be an enjoyable experience for me.



I'll have a new life, new experience here at the end of october this year.^^