I've been trying to redo some presentations about the architecture of the Distributed Field Robot Architecture. It seem that we have some interest from several groups regarding actually using it for large robotics projects. So I have been trying to clean the codebase up a little bit (amazing the cruft that develops...) and build some new presentations to explain some of the design elements behind what I have been doing.

As per request, I am linking to the videos that I used during the presentation. They are Windows Media, for the most part; I typically use Quicktime, but these had already been converted. YMMV

techknowledge:

[13MB WMV]

Medical Triage Sensor:

[52MB AVI]

Night Vision Sensor:

[200KB WMV, 53KB WMV, 40KB WMV]

More information, especially pictures and context, on the CRASAR Hurricane Charley page.

Other exciting clips include Aaron's work on Affective Recruitment. I did not have time to discuss it in the presentation, but it was a good exercise stressing the distributed architecture and is an interesting view:

[54MB WMV]

And finally, I touched on our use of VTOLs. We have a news clip that shows a little of our work in that area:

[4.3MB WMV]

A note on the videos: Windows Media Player will try to stream these files and most likely complain. If this happens, just download the file and it should play correctly.

I gave a presentation this morning to the Florida West Coast section. As you can see, I was primarily talking about the search and rescue group at USF, CRASAR. As per request, I am posting some copies of slides in [PDF] and [Flash]. I did this presentation in Keynote, which most people don't use, so hopefully these versions will work.

I thought the presentation went reasonably well -- no one actually fell asleep on me and I had a good question and answer session at the end. I have a few things I would like to change the next time I do this talk, which will likely be in a few months at the IEEE Sections Congress here in Tampa. I think a better approach for that venue will be a "Day in the Life of a Rescue Robot", and using this I can build a better framework for the presentation. Should be fun -- especially since the audience there will be more on the order of a thousand...

Oh, the videos that I used in the presentation were pretty massive. If anyone is interested in the media clips I used, please email me and I will see if I can dig up smaller / more compressed versions.