Month: April 2009

Single Camera SLAM

This is technology that could provide cheap real-time localisation for domestic robots, humanoid robots, wearable sensors, game interfaces or other devices.

My research has been on SLAM, with a particular emphasis on Single Camera SLAM. This is technology that could provide cheap real-time localisation for domestic robots, humanoid robots, wearable sensors, game interfaces or other devices.

Might as well panic

If you don’t know what to do, and you’re frightened, might as well panic. That seems to be the first rule of being a member of the human race. Apparently, panicking is an acceptable substitute for forethought, contingency planning or actually taking productive action. We almost want to blame the thing we’re anxious about on the person who isn’t panicking. “Don’t you care! Can’t you see that we’re all gonna die! That we’re going to go bankrupt? That the world as we know it is going to end?” More people are killed by deer than sharks, but you don’t see park rangers running around like nutcases.

Tunnel Dreams

at night you dream of tunnels – because you are actually in control of tunneling equipment operating somewhere beneath the surface of the earth.

if you can directly link the brain of a paralyzed soldier to a computer mouse – and then to a drone aircraft, and then perhaps to an entire fleet of armed drones circling over enemy territory – then surely you could also hook that brain up to, say, lawnmowers, remote-controlled tunneling machines, lunar landing modules, strip-mining equipment, and even 3D printers.

Shrink Flint

Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods. The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval.

now do it for all suburbs.

Neutrino Communication

Jolting the star with neutrinos could advance the pulsation by causing it to heat up and expand. Information could thus be shuttled around our galaxy’s network of 500 or so Cepheids – and out as far as the Virgo cluster of galaxies.

does this mean we’ll finally have internet in the subway?

Beams of neutrinos have been proposed as a vehicle for communications under unusual circumstances, such as direct point-to-point global communication, communication with submarines, secure communications and interstellar communication. We report on the performance of a low-rate communications link established using the NuMI beam line and the MINERvA detector at Fermilab. The link achieved a decoded data rate of 0.1 bits/sec with a bit error rate of 1% over a distance of 1.035 km, including 240 m of earth.

To make use of neutrinos an advanced civilization can use a gravitational lens as a focus and amplifier. The lens can be a neutron star or a black hole. Using wave optics one can calculate the advantage of gravitational lensing for amplification of a beam and along the optical axis it is exceptionally large. Even though the amplification is very large the diameter of the beam is quite small, less that 1 cm. This implies that a large constellation of neutrino transmitters would have to enclose the local neutron star or black hole to cover the sky. This means that such a beacon would have to be built by a Kardashev Type II civilization.