Getting Ready for January

Last week we got a number of things done:

1) We talked about what we had accomplished up through the regional tournament and each came up with "two stars and a wish" - that is, two things we thought we did well this season, and one thing we'd like to work on some more.  Between now and the provincial tournament we're going to try to make more progress on the "wishes".

2) We learned how to make and edit 3D models using a program called Sculptris.  Remember, if we're going to train a computer to recognize particular animals, we need to give it lots of examples to learn from.  Those examples can't all be the same.  They have to have enough variety that the computer can learn to tell the animal we're looking for from other animals and non-animals.  We bought a bag of toy cows to train the computer on what cows look like, but the cows in the bag were all identical.  That won't work because the computer will think all cows are exactly the same.  So instead we got a 3D model of a wildebeest and each took turns putting it in different poses to get some variety.  Since last week we printed out all the different animals on our 3D printer, as you can see below.

Ten Wildebeest designed by the Comet Warriors

With wildebeest models in a dozen different sizes and poses we can now do a better job teaching the computer what to expect.

3) Running the robot.  At the tournament, Olivia (also le mot de la semaine), Lily, and Macy were responsible for running the robot.  Last week they worked to teach others how to line up and run the robot, change attachments, switch missions, and so on.  Hopefully, by the end of the season everyone will know how to do this.

4) Planned our next fundraiser.  We plan to sell reindeer hot chocolate kits at the school Christmas party.  This was very successful last year so we're going to try it again.  We'll spend some time this week on putting the kits together.

Homework for this week:

1) Take a look at the Grevy's Zebra Website  This site explains how the Grevy's Zebra Trust did a census of zebras in Kenya.  It involved a lot of driving around with cameras.  A group at Princeton then used computers to try to tell one zebra from another based on the pattern of stripes on their hip.  The woman who runs the Grevy's Zebra Trust, Belinda Mackey, is one of the people we shared our research with.  The video below is a talk she gave in San Francisco in October.  It's half an hour long.  It's worth watching, but if you don't have time for the whole thing watch at least the last six minutes - starting at 25:00.  It gives great examples of how to get people involved in conservation.  It's not as simple as showing up with a new technology.

Belinda Mackey's talk on Zebra Conservation

Lastly, some good news from one of our experts!  When we had our yard sale in October, John Abrams stopped by and was interested in what we were doing.  He has a friend, Tim Lillicrap, who works for Google Deep Mind in London, England.  Well John put us in touch with Tim, and Tim has offered to come visit us on Dec. 22, the last meeting of the year.  Tim works on some of the coolest machine learning stuff in the world (like teaching robots to dream) and is interested to see what we're up to.  Maybe he can give us some ideas on how to make it better.

See you Thursday!

Congratulations, Comet Warriors!

The Comet Warriors competed at the Kingston Regional FLL tournament and did very well, coming away with the Robot Performance Award for the highest scoring robot, as well as the Champions Award for the best performance across robot performance, research, and core values.  Everybody on the team, from the oldest to the youngest, made important contributions to our success on Saturday, and you all performed extremely well.  It was great fun to watch. Congratulations!

What this means is that it's off to Oshawa in January for the provincial tournament, where the other participants will be the top 10 percent of teams from downtown Toronto all the way east to the Quebec border.  That's a lot of area and a lot of really good teams.  We're going to need to do a lot more work between now and January if we want to represent ECC and Kingston well.

For the next week, though, we can relax a bit.  So there's no homework this week.

Picking Up Some Hardware

Got A Few Problems Sorted Out

Trying to Figure Out What's Going Wrong

10 Days to Go

Good progress over the past week, Comets!  Since our last post we have:

1) Put together a first version of our presentation.
2) Gotten two more robot missions to work: getting food out of the fridge, and feeding some of the animals.
3) Gotten movement detection working for our project.  That is, we got the computer to look at videos of the cows and identify them by the fact that they're moving.

For those looking for the word of the week, since we got the fridge mission to work, the word for this week is Fridge.

Some things we need to work on for homework for this week, and over the next ten days, are:
1) Everybody needs to learn their lines for our presentation.  You've all received a copy of the script either on paper or in email, so make sure you learn your part.
2) Everybody needs to think back on what they've personally done so far this season.  A lot of this is covered right here on the blog, so make sure you re-read it and know what your responsibilities were.
3) Some of you got individual assignments - writing emails, doing research, making props, etc. - that you need to do at home.

Also, we're going to try to meet every day at lunch between now and the tournament on Nov. 19th.  We'll also be having more evening and weekend meetings, which you should have received emails on.  This past weekend we had an impromptu "plaid day" to work on robot programming.  Check it out:

I was just joking about the word being Fridge.  It's actually "pez" because the fridge works more like a pez dispenser, and so does our attachment.

Less than three weeks to go

Good job last week, Warriors!  Especially to those participating in the presentation at the Toronto Audio Visual and Electronics Show on separating silicon from silicon carbide.  The presentation went very well and I think everyone found it entertaining and informative.

We made more progress on all fronts including:

a) The teamwork and communication show during the "build what we built" exercise was very good.  I especially liked the "E-C-O-L-E C-O-M-E-T-S Go Comets!"

b) Everybody learned to fly the drone.

c) Everybody learned to scan things in 3D

d) Nick, Alyssa, and Lais learned to convert a collection of pictures into a 3D model.

e) Tara and Macy learned to operate the infrared camera.

c) Lily and Olivia learned to use the gyro sensor.

In addition, after the Electronics show Tara, Olivia, Helen and I went to Lucknow, Ontario to see if we could get some drone pictures of cows.  Tara and Olivia's aunt and uncle (Paul and Christine - words of the week) raise cattle.  They let the girls fly the drone above the cows to see what we could learn about counting them.  They got a bunch of pictures which they stitched together into the image below, and if you zoom in you can see the individual cows in the closeup below that.

Stitched Images

Aerial Closeup

They also tried taking pictures with the infrared camera.  They attached the camera to the bottom of the drone and got one good picture of the car as the drone went up.  Unfortunately the camera fell off the drone almost immediately, but we were able to find it.  They took pictures from the ground after that, and are looking for a better way to attach it.  The pictures look promising, though.  Below are the pictures of the car from above, with the yellow area being the warm hood over the engine.  Also, there's a normal picture of the cows at the fence with another picture taken with the infrared camera showing that the cows are warm.

Car with a Warm Hood

Cows at the Fence

Infrared Cows at the Fence

Next we'll see if our 3D reconstruction techniques can tell us how tall the cows are.  If they look like cows, are as warm as cows, and are as tall as cows, we can be pretty sure they are cows, and not cow-shaped rocks or bushes.