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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 ...