Surveyor Robotics Journal

Surveyor Robotics Journal

	email: support@surveyor.com web: Surveyor Corporation rss: Subscribe Archives March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 Februray 2006 January 2006	Fri, 26 Dec 2008 SRV-1 Blackfin now plays chess ! Okay ... this is a bit off-the-wall, but I came across a very nice chess engine called TSCP - Tom Kerrigan's Simple Chess Program, and couldn't resist the exercise of porting it to the SRV-1 Blackfin camera board. TSCP isn't going to take down any chess grandmasters, but this is a pretty good engine, and it fits into slightly more than 3kB of code space. The code is currently loaded into SDRAM rather than L1 cache, but it could run 4x faster just by changing the srv1.x load table. There is a set of book openings, "book.txt", but to incorporate them, we had to add some firmware commands to read and write other flash sectors to store the data. At the moment, the book functions aren't generating random openings, but we should have that fixed soon. This is what the program looks like when invoked using the 'C' command via a terminal connection: Besides being an interesting exercise in porting new functions to the SRV-1, part of the concept was that someone might eventually want to add vision processing functions to actually recognize chess piece positions on a board and even a manipulator to move the pieces. If anyone went to that much trouble, they might want a stronger chess engine or an adaptive engine that learned, but TSCP is certainly a good starting point. Discussion of this latest version of firmware, along with download links, is found here. Posted Fri, 26 Dec 2008 18:47 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Tue, 16 Dec 2008 "Teaching AI Concepts Using a Robot as an Assistant" As presented at the Fourth UK Workshop on AI in Education, Cambridge, 9th December 2008, the Surveyor SRV-1 robot has been used very effectively as a tool for teaching AI concepts. "Teaching AI Concepts Using a Robot as an Assistant" was presented by Eleftherios Karapetsas and Demos Stamatis, Alexander Technological Educational Institution of Thessaloniki. They used a stock SRV-1 robot, but added an optical sensor for odometry, as discussed here on the Surveyor Forum Likewise, default SRV-1 firmware was used as a starting point, though some functions were added to build upon existing image processing functions in the firmware. The results were excellent, as described in the technical paper and presentation, accessed here - http://dces.essex.ac.uk/staff/mfasli/eventorganisation/AIinEducation4/Paper3-Karapetsas.pdf http://dces.essex.ac.uk/staff/mfasli/eventorganisation/AIinEducation4/PPP3-Karapetsas.pdf Posted Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:47 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Surveyor SRV-1 / SVS firmware now archived on Google Code We have a new home for the open source SRV-1 / SVS firmware where you can browse the source code online: http://code.google.com/p/surveyor-srv1-firmware/ This site hosts an SVN server, so you can directly check out the source code using the following svn command, which will save everything to a blackfin/ subdirectory under your current working directory: svn checkout http://surveyor-srv1-firmware.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ . Google provides a list of interesting SVN clients that might be useful in managing the download process. Take a look at the following link and let us know if any of these are particularly noteworthy: http://subversion.tigris.org/links.html We will continue to post code archives in zipped form on surveyor.com, but expect that the Google Code archive will become the preferred means of accessing the SRV-1 / SVS firmware. Posted Tue, 16 Dec 2008 17:59 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ...