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Fri, 08 Feb 2008
Transterpreter, occam-pi and concurrency on the SRV-1 Blackfin
I first met members of the Transterpreter development group from University of Kent last year at the AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford, and was really impressed with their architecture and portability of their tools, as demonstrated by their performance in the competition at the end of the conference - http://www.surveyor.com/cgi-bin/robot_journal.cgi/2007/03/29#091 and http://www.surveyor.com/cgi-bin/robot_journal.cgi/2007/04/09#094.
Since that time, the group has scattered somewhat, with Christian finishing his PhD and moving to France, Jon joining the PhD program at Kent, and Matt returning to the US as a visiting professor at Olin College. However, Matt contacted us a few months ago looking for robots to use in an engineering class, enlisting Jon and others to help with a port of the Transterpreter to the SRV-1 Blackfin. The results are pretty spectacular ...
Matt and his team have built a complete graphical development environment for the SRV-1 using existing Transterpreter tools. You write some code in the occam-pi programming language, hit "Compile", hit "Run", and it uploads your code to the SRV and you're rolling. They have provided an easy way to send and receive text from the SRV-1 as well as images; if the robot transmits an image, the IDE automatically catches the image header and opens up a window of the appropriate size to display the image. They have also written the entire SRV-1 control loop in occam-pi, so that it can be easily modified.
A more complete description of the development environment is found here on the Transterpreter blog, with additional blog posts describing other aspects of the project. This is a very exciting development - projects like the Transterpreter port and the Matlab port mentioned yesterday significantly leverage the core development work we're doing for the SRV-1 Blackfin, and this is very rewarding to see.
Posted Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:50 | HTML Link | see additional stories ...