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Movies   Testbed Movies show experiments conducted on our testbed crane and a collection of robots in our lab. Simulator Movies show the output of simulated robots.   Testbed Movies Mar 03: This movie shows the entire experiment, including the docking of both ends of the beam. [MPEG 37.0 M] Mar 01: This movie is similar to the one taken in October 00 (see below), but the system is more robust and faster, and the video quality is better. [ MPEG 38.2 M] December 00: Part of a narrated documentary made by the Discovery Channel about the DIRA project. [ QuickTime Streaming 125.2 M] October 00: Robocrane, Whiplash, and Xavier cooperate to perform a beam docking task. Xavier uses stereo cameras to find the offset between the fiducials mounted on the moving beam and the stationary receptacle into which the beam has to be mounted. Robocrane moves the beam into the workspace of the arm, then stops while the Whiplash arm does the final precision mating. The video lasts about four minutes. [ QuickTime Streaming 57.2 M] May 00: Robocrane and Amelia cooperate to perform a beam docking task. Amelia uses stereo cameras to find the offset between the fiducials mounted on the moving beam and the stationary receptacle into which the beam has to be mounted. [ QuickTime Streaming 12.1 M] [ AVI 7.4 M] May 00: Robot arm that will be used for fine manipulation in the docking task. The arm was developed and built by Rob Ambrose and Rob Burridge at Metrica, and designed under a contract to NASA JSC. We have dubbed this arm "whiplash". [ QuickTime Streaming 7.5 M] Simulator The DIRA simulator is based on the Viz visualization engine, developed at NASA Ames. Viz generates stereo pairs which simulate the data returned by cameras on the "roving eye" robot. Our initial experiments focus on a simple construction task: docking a beam with a structure already in place. Beam Docking 1 [QuickTime 1.0 M] shows the robocrane and the roving eye visually servoing the beam to dock with its target, without the aid of the mobile manipulator. You will see the following sequence: The movie starts immediately after the robocrane has grasped the beam from its resting point on the floor. Scripted motion. The robocrane has rough prior knowledge of the absolute position of the beam target, and servos to a nearby position to begin visual servoing. Closed-loop control of the eye. Once the beam is near the target, the roving eye motion is activated. The roving eye attempts to move forward or back and use its pan/tilt head to get the best possible view of the fiducials on beam and target. In this movie, the roving eye motion is very small because the starting position gives a good view. Closed-loop control of the beam. Simultaneously, the roving eye reports the relative position of the two fiducials to the manipulation manager, which repeatedly commands the crane until the relative position matches the known offset when the beam is docked properly. The movie ends with the beam in place. Last modified: Fri Apr 6 16:44:23 2001