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Update: added some nice pictures from the lab and the robots

There is a small paradox at our department: we are teaching robotics to students, but we used to not have any robots around for them to play with. We actually did have one, that is very very dangerous to use close to people, so I slowly slowly phased it out of use.

But I had to find an alternative: a small, versatile, cheap, robot arm, that we could buy multiples of it and have one for each table of the laboratory. That was how the dream started, and finally, today, this dream came true! Today I finished assemblying and installing the 10th AL5D robot arm in our laboratory!

For quite some time now, I wanted to create a robot model to use it in the classroom. I started imagining it as a 3D printed model, then thought of making it out of styrofoam, converted the idea to carton, but was always stopped by the lack of materials around. Also, the fact that we’ve been teaching online for the past year and a half was not helping.

Last week, I thought of wood. And the moment I thought about it I was wondering how come I didn’t think about this all this time! It is the obvious solution, as there is always wood scraps readily available that I am saving from other projects, plus I have the tools to work with it. So, I spent ~2 years thinking about this, and eventually it took me around 20’ to make it! Here is the result.

I don’t remember when did it exactly happen, but at some point I landed on a elegant looking community blog that is called Less Wrong. They advertise themselves as “[…] a community dedicated to improving our reasoning and decision-making” and the name is derived by the realisation that in order to learn, we must constantly err, but each time less and less.

It is basically a blog where anyone can post essays or ideas on the topic of rationality and real-world applications of it. Applications such as AI, decision making, or community structuring. The site offers a very nice way of commenting and ‘rating’ these essays, and in general it seems like a nice place to be, so I kept visiting it every now and then.

As you might have noticed, I have been a bit silent for more than a year now. In case you were wondering, I am fine, just that life became quite busy this last year. I will try to update this blog with the most important news since last year not necessarily in the order that they happened.

One of the things that kept me mostly busy this period was the BETER REHAB project. The project was about robotic rehabilitation using a robot manipulator based on the intention of the patient. Well, the project was supposed to end in April 2020, but due to the CoVID-19 pandemic, the end was postponed until June 2020. This was necessary to perform the final measurements for the project, which was impossible to do during the lock-down period of March and April.

What is a thesis?

A thesis is a project that you are expected to start, develop and conclude in order to graduate the university. The topic belongs to you and can be one of your passions or an idea you want to try. You might also have no idea what you want do. That would not make you neither the first, nor the last. Try though to make at least a list of likes and dislikes in terms of subjects. Bouncing ideas to define a topic is definitely an option before working together. You can also check a list of ideas that I would be interested to develop as theses.

For those that know me a bit, they know that I really like playing chess. I got infected by the virus at a very young age, learning to play the game from my father since I remember my self and joining local chess clubs with my brother. I never really became good at it, having won only one local tournament by the age of 18 (and this happened cause I had no other participants in my age group and competed with lower ages :P). But I always liked it and kept playing it.

For those of you that follow this blog for many years, you might remember an old post about buying an ebook reader. That was back in 2012, and a lot of things have changed since then. However, my appreciation for that little device is not among the things that did change, and I am still a proud owner of an ebook reader. Even though my originally device was stolen, I did buy a second one, and currently is one of my most beloved pieces of technology (much more beloved than my smartphone).

Even though I am usually not fond of information transmitted over the audio, for some reason I was fascinated by the idea of podcasts ever since I first heard of it. But somehow, I never find the time to listen to the podcasts that I seem to care about, so the unread episodes just keep on pilling and pilling. This week, I decided to dedicate it to podcasts and listen to everything that was on my list. So, every time I had a few idle minutes, I fired up my podcast app (AntennaPod for Android) and selected the next one on the list.

Even before I fully switched to a Linux machine, some 10 years ago, I was still a passionate user of open source software. Although usually buggy and less feature rich back then, it somehow appealed to me to be able to use the work of others for free (and legally!). Fast-forward 10 years to the future and now I am relying on open source software for the vast majority of my work and entertainment. It is hard to really quantify, but I would estimate that I am using open source software for about 95% of my software needs.