Alt-BEAM Archive

Message #11625



To: beam@sgiblab.sgi.com
From: Bruce Robinson Bruce_Robinson@telus.net
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2000 16:59:08 -0800
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: The latest websites (and Wilf's circuits)


Hi, Justin. Welcome back.

> Are there other sites that now fill the same function?

You can find most of Wilf's circuits at the Beam Heretics site, under
the Rigter Archive.

http://www.serve.com/heretics/

Richard Caudle has some interesting stuff as well, including articles by
a number of prominent BEAMers. Poke around at:

http://www.geocities.com/frankendaddy/BEAM.html

Regards,
Bruce



11626 Sat, 11 Mar 2000 19:57:44 EST [alt-beam] Re: walker beam@sgiblab.sgi.com "Cory Houck"

>From: BUDSCOTT@aol.com
>Reply-To: beam@sgiblab.sgi.com
>To: beam@sgiblab.sgi.com
>Subject: Re: walker
>Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2000 18:41:18 EST
>
>What you will probably need is a type of motor driver, unless you have high
>efficiency geared motors like escaps. He also has the circuits for that
>too.
>The tutorial your going off of looks like its only a single (master)
>bicore,
>what you need is a double (master/slave) setup, look on his schematics
>page.
>I could be wrong though.
>
> -Spencer





>I dont do that well with schematics is there a way i could make two of
>those and hook the together? Aand can i use hobby servos without a moter
>driver

______________________________________________________



11627 Sat, 11 Mar 2000 17:25:27 -0800 (PST) [alt-beam] Re: Potential (LOL) gear motors?? beam@sgiblab.sgi.com Daniel Grace Wow, what an idea! If nobody answers saying they're no
good, and if I go out tonight, I'll make sure to pick
one up! The main reason I haven't built a head is the
lack of gear motors without mail order. I hate waiting
for parts. It these work well, I may buy a bunch of
them. Best tasting source of parts, for sure!

~Daniel

--- William Cox wrote:
> Hey all,
> This is a stupid questions, but has any body
> tried those rotating suckers
> to see what powers them? They turn real slow. I was
> just wondering.
> -William
>
> ____________________________
> http://robot-central.webjump.com/
> Robotics books, projects, resources,
> links, news, and more!
>
>

=====
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11628 Sat, 11 Mar 2000 12:25:11 +1100 $6 Vision System "BEAM" "Richard Piotter"
> Got this off another list. Sounds interesting... A $6 vision system that
> uses microprocessing and neural nets to carry out tasks previously
> limited to multi thousand dolar machines!!!
>
>
> Think of what you could do with this as a $6.00 part!
>
> French firm offers $6 vision system-on-a-chip
> By R. Colin Johnson
> EE Times
> (03/09/00, 09:45:27 AM EDT)
>
> FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. ( ChipWire) -- A French technology research company
> has unwrapped a vision-processing system-on-a-chip that it claims can be
> manufactured as inexpensively as a microcontroller. The $6 Generic Visual
> Perception Processor (GVPP) can automatically detect objects and track
their
> movement in real-time, according to Bureau d'Etudes Vision (BEV).
>
> The rights to manufacture the GVPP will be up for grabs at a technology
> auction slated for next month. If properly commercialized, auctioneers
> PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP estimate a multibillion-dollar gross revenue
> stream for the GVPP based on 100 proposed applications in 10 industries.
>
> "We couldn't manage multiple licenses to competing companies," said Nabeel
> Al-Adsani, director of operations at BEV. "Instead, we hope to interest
> major semiconductor manufacturers in licensing the GVPP so that they can
> supply the application-specific companies with chips."
>
> The GVPP, which crunches 20 billion instructions per second (bips), models
> the human perceptual process at the hardware level by mimicking the
separate
> temporal and spatial functions of the eye-to-brain system. The processor
> sees its environment as a stream of histograms regarding the location and
> velocity of objects. Those objects could be the white lines on a highway,
> the footballin a televised game or the annotated movement of enemy ground
> forces from satellite telemetry.
>
> Alongside a CMOS imager on its 2-x-4-inch evaluation board, the GVPP has
> been demonstrated as capable of learning-in-place to solve a variety of
> pattern recognition problems. It boasts automatic normalization for
varying
> object size, orientation and lighting conditions, and can function in
> daylight or darkness.
>
> A complete GVPP system including the charge-coupled device and all support
> circuitry should cost less than $50, the company said. BEV also claimed
that
> the software it provides with the chips permits engineers to develop
> applications for the GVPP in just a few weeks.
>
> The GVPP was invented in 1992, when BEV founder Patric Pirim saw that it
> would be relatively simple for a CMOS chip to implement in hardware the
> separate contributions of temporal and spatial processing in the brain.
The
> brain-eye system uses layers of parallel-processing neurons that pass the
> signal through a series of preprocessing steps, resulting in real-time
> tracking of multiple moving objects within a visual scene.
>
> Pirim created a chip architecture that mimicked the work of the neurons,
> with the help of multiplexing and memory. The result is an inexpensive
> device that can autonomously "perceive" and then track up to eight
> user-specified objects in a video stream based on hue, luminance,
> saturation, spatial orientation, speed and direction of motion, the
company
> claims .
>
> The GVPP tracks an "object," defined as a certain set of hue, luminance
and
> saturation values in a specific shape, from frame to frame in a video
stream
> by anticipating where its leading and trailing edges make "differences"
with
> the background. That means it can track an object through varying light
> sources or changes in size, as when an object gets closer to the viewer or
> moves farther away.
>
> The chip houses 23 neural blocks, both temporal and spatial, each
consisting
> of 20 hardware input and output "synaptic" connections. The GVPP
multiplexes
> this neural hardware with off-chip scratchpad memory to simulate as many
as
> 100,000 synaptic connections per neuron. Each of these synapses can be
> changed through the on-chip microprocessor for a combined processing total
> of over 6.2 billion synaptic connections per second.
>
> In executing up to 20 bips to analyze successive frames of a video stream,
> the temporal neurons identify pixels that have changed over time and
> generate a 3-bit value indicative of the magnitude of that change. The
> spatial-processing system analyzes the resulting "difference" histogram to
> calculate the speed and direction of the motion.
>
> The GVPP's major performance strength over current-day $10,000 vision
> systems is its automatic adaptation to varying lighting conditions.
Today's
> vision systems dictate uniform, shadowless illumination, and even
> next-generation prototype systems, designed to work under "normal"
lighting
> conditions, can be used only from dawn to dusk. The GVPP, on the other
hand,
> adapts to real-time changes in lighting without recalibration, day or
night.
>
> Since processing in each module on the GVPP runs in parallel out of its
own
> memory space, multiple GVPP chips can be cascaded to expand the number of
> objects that can be recognized and tracked. When set in master-slave mode,
> any number of GVPP chips can divide and conquer, for instance, complex
> stereoscopic vision applications.
>
> On the software side, a host operating system running on an external PC
> communicates with the GVPP's evaluation board via an OS kernel within the
> on-chip microprocessor. BEV dubs the neural-learning capability of its
> development environment "programming by seeing and doing," because of its
> ease of use. The engineer needs no knowledge of the internal workings of
the
> GVPP, the company said, only application-specific domain knowledge.
>
> "Programming the GVPP is as simple as setting a few registers, and then
> testing the results to gauge the application's success," said Steve Rowe,
> BEV's director of research and development. "Once debugged, these tiny
> application programs are loaded directly into the GVPP's internal ROM."
>
> Application programs themselves can use C++, which makes calls to a
library
> of assembly language algorithms for visual perception and tracking of
> objects. The system's modular approach permits the developer to create a
> hierarchy of application building blocks that simplify problems with
> inheritable software characteristics.
>
> "Simple applications can be quickly prototyped in a few days, with
> medium-size applications taking a few weeks and even big applications
> only a
> couple of months," said Rowe.
>
> In applications, each pixel may be described with respect to any of the
six
> domains of information available to it: hue, luminance, saturation, speed,
> direction of motion and spatial orientation. The GVPP further
subcategorizes
> pixels by ranges, for instance luminance within 10% and 65%, hue of blue,
> saturation between 20% and 25% and moving upward in scene.
>
> A set of second-level pattern recognition commands permits the GVPP to
> search for different objects in different parts of the scene -- for
> instance, to look for a closed eyelid only within the rectangle bordered
by
> the corners of the eye. Since some applications may also require multiple
> levels of recognition, the GVPP has software hooks to pass along the
> recognition task from level to level.
>
> For instance, to detect when a driver is falling asleep -- a capability
that
> could find use in California, which is about to mandate that cars sound an
> "alarm" when drowsy drivers begin to nod off --the GVPP is first
programmed
> to detect the driver's head, for which it creates histograms of head
> movement. The microprocessor reads these histograms to identify the area
for
> the eye.
>
> Then the recognition task passes to the next level, which searches only
> within the eye area rectangles. High-speed movement there, normally
> indicative of blinking, is discounted, but when blinks become slower
> than a
> predetermined level, they are interpreted as the driver nodding off, and
> trigger an alarm.
>
> Pirim has long-term plans out to 2006 for the GVPP. "We have a very clear
> set of upgrades to take advantage of putting more transistors onto our
> system-on-a-chip," said Pirim.
>
> First, a CMOS imager will be integrated on-chip with the GVPP, enabling
> watch-size vision systems by 2002. After that, Pirim plans to integrate
> flash memory that will enable a system the size of a pinkie ring by 2004.
> And by 2006, Pirim has slated an expanded on-chip DRAM plus beefed up
> on-chip processing to solve multisensor fusion applications in
hat-pin-size
> vision systems.
>
> Application-specific software libraries are also planned, including
optical
> character recognition, 3-D analysis and spatial organization.
>
> BEV lists possible applications for the GVPP in process monitoring,
quality
> control and assembly; automotive systems such as intelligent air bags that
> monitor passenger size and traffic congestion monitors; pedestrian
> detection, license plate recognition, electronic toll collection,
automatic
> parking management, automatic inspection; and medical uses including
disease
> identification. The chip could also prove useful in unmanned air vehicles,
> miniature smart weapons, ground reconnaissance and other military
> applications, as well as in security access using facial, iris,
fingerprint,
> or height and gait identification.
> --
>
>
> Richard Piotter The Richfiles Robotics & TI web page:
> richfile@rconnect.com http://richfiles.calc.org
>
> -- Make Money by Simply Surfing the Net or responding to E-Mail!!!
> -- Click below!!!
>
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