Finding Zeno

Remember the story about Zeno's paradox, with Achilles and the tortoise?  Well, now we know how to do a computer simulation of that story :-)

Last week our first paper on enclosures and hybrid systems (entitled, "Enclosing the Behavior of a Hybrid System up to and Beyond a Zeno Point") was accepted for publication at the First IEEE Conference of Cyber-Physical Systems, Networks, and Applications (CPSNA 2013).

The figure on the right, taken from the paper, illustrates the basic idea of the new method on another example of Zeno behavior, namely, a bouncing ball.  The approach presented in the paper is to compute an "enclosure" (illustrated in grey in the diagram).  Using enclosures makes it possible simulate the system past the Zeno point without going into an infinite loop.

Two Special Guests Visit the NAO Halmstad Group

Two guests who are getting ready to graduate from Kindergarten visited Halmstad University last Friday to meet Jonson and Mörner, two members of the NAO Halmstad Group.  The visit was hosted by Jonas Jonson (no relation), Alexey Taktarov, Yingfu Zeng, Jawad Masood, and Walid Taha.  (See more pictures from visit)

The special guests became interested in meeting the robots after seeing a segment on TV4 about the NAO Halmstad Group.  The visit included showing off some of the capabilities that the NAOs come pre-programmed with (including dancing, Tai Chi, walking, speech synthesis, and speech recognition) and an interactive discussion of how the robots can be programmed by a sequence of basic primitives such as walking, turning, moving hands, closing the grip, and so on.  This was followed by a discussion of what these robots are made of, including cameras, motors, and (as one of our young guests pointed out) microphones.  They were also showed a recording of a recent walk by Jonson using code that was developed by our colleagues at the AMBER lab at Texas A&M.

The guests appeared content with the demonstrations.  Depending on the level of their future interest in this subject, we may have had seven or eight generations of engineers at this meeting.  We will keep our fingers crossed for the next twelve years :-)

NAO Halmstad Group's First Experiment

Jawad, Yingfu, and Ayonga (Texas A&M) worked hard this weekend to carry out a series of experiments based on new control code developed by the AMBER lab at Texas A&M.  The new code, which aims to produce stable human-like walking, was tested on several surfaces both indoors and outdoors.  The following video shows a walk on the asphalt between the F and R buildings:

The NAO Halmstad Group consists of five same-batch NAO robots, and is intended to be used as a common platform for experimentation among four universities, including Rice University, Halmstad University, Texas A&M, and Al-Faisal University. This experiment constitutes the first use of the platform for this purpose.

Invited talk at EOOLT 2013

Walid gave the invited talk at the Fifth International Workshop on Equation-based Object Oriented Languages (EOOLT 2013), describing recent work on Enclosing Hybrid Behaviors.  The work is joint work with Michal Konecny, Jan Duracz, Adam Duracz, and Aaron Ames.  The website makes available online the papers, slides, and pictures from the meeting.  The picture shown to the left is taken from the website.

TV4 Halland Insert about the Halmstad Group

TV Halland made an piece about the Halmstad Group, which consists of five NAO humanoid robots shared by Rice University, Texas A&M University, Al-Faisal University, and Halmstad University.

 

 The piece was aired April 17th, 2013.

New Paper: "A First Course on Cyber Physical Systems"

by Walid Taha, Robert Cartwright, Roland Philippsen, and Yingfu Zeng

will be presented at the first Workshop on CPS Education (CPS-Ed) at CPSWeek 2013 on April 8th, 2013 in Philadelphia.

Abstract: Effective and creative CPS development requires expertise in disparate fields that have traditionally been taught in distinct disciplines. At the same time, students seeking a CPS education generally come from diverse educational backgrounds. In this paper we report on our recent experience developing and teaching a course on CPS. The course can be seen as a detailed proposal focused on three three key questions: What are the core elements of CPS? How can these core concepts be integrated in the CPS design process? What types of modeling tools can assist in the design of cyber-physical systems? Experience from the first two offerings of the course is promising, and we discuss the lessons learned. All materials including lecture notes and software used for the course are openly available online.

A preprint of the paper can be found here.