Clubs, Projects, and Jobs

Barnstormers
First up, the Barnstormers have a new website. They actually don't know it yet because Claire and I have been building it at a temporary location on a domain that I own while I sort out getting a domain of our own. It uses the WordPress blogging software and I hope will be immensely more maintainable (and thus more useful) than the website Claire and I inherited from days gone by. The blogging I intend to use as news posts and updates. I'm not sure if I want the news to be the front page (as it is at the time of this post) or if I want the front page to be an introduction to the club and who we are.

Additionally, we are going to Edwards Air Force Base to get a tour of the Flight Test Center there. Edwards is where everything eventually winds up for testing before the Air Force will accept it and we have an alumnus who works there testing F-16 armament systems. Sign ups for HMC students to go on the Edwards trip are going on right now and we'll be heading out there on the 17th of April.

Theremin, Thoremin, Th[eo]remin-Bot
I believe I've mentioned that there is a student-run electronics lab club at HMC now. Not only does said club exist, but it now has funding. And to raise interest, our intrepid leaders, Nate and Raffi, have decided that the club will buy kits for students to fun projects and then hold a projects day at the dining hall to show them off!

I took one look at Nate's e-mail and decided that this was my excuse to build a theremin, since I didn't get around to it last summer. After poking around the Internet for a while I had found a few theremin kits that appeared to come mostly preassembled (no fun for an e-lab project) and this. Art's Theremin Page gives instructions, schematics and component lists for building several theremins including one using vacuum tubes to get a 5 octave range.

I told Nate that I wanted to build one and that if someone else built a tesla coil we could pair them into a Thoremin. I steal the name shamelessly from one of the suggested names for the following:

The other suggested name was Zeusaphone. This tesla coil is actually producing the music; sound is just vibration of our ear drums at some frequency in the audible range. By firing the tesla coil, say 440 times per second, we can create a musical note. By feeding its controller the waveform of a piece of music, the tesla coil can be made to act as an enormous speaker that happens to shoot lightening bolts. Similarly, below you can see the result of someone using a (much smaller) tesla coil as an amp for his guitar:

One of the other students in the electronics lab, upon hearing that I intend to build a theremin, decided that he wanted to build a theremin-playing robot for a class next year.

Job Hunt
I have been applying for jobs this semester. So far I have interviewed at DreamHost and AeroVironment and I'm waiting to hear back from them. Google is flying me to Mountain View this Thursday for an interview on Friday, which I am really unbelievably stoked about. I've also dropped my resume to a few other places, but these three are the three I'm most far along with. (For those who remember, I'm also looking at Edwards AFB. I'll be talking more with Nate when we visit in April. Incidentally, AeroVironment is located in Simi Valley, shown in the lower-left corner of that map.)

I now need to admit my geekiness (you can prevent laughing at this sentence if you ignore everything above this point in the post, and all my past posts, by the way). I finally found a resume class for LaTeX that was close enough to what I wanted that I took the effort to modify it and port my resume away from Microsoft Word. The Word file I had was fairly finnickey and would not hold all its formatting if I tried to use ANY other programs to open it; Open Office (which I generally dislike), Abiword, and Google Docs all ran it on to a second page and so I always needed to be using a Windows computer (or a mac with MS Office) when I edited/printed my resume.

Now, I have a subversion repository online that holds the most up-to-date copies of my resume and cover letter. Feel free, of course, to take the .tex files and the resume.cls file to TeX up your own resume. If you're interested, you can find a rather nice IDE for using LaTeX on Windows here. Linux tends to come with LaTeX installed, and I think Mac OS X does as well. Of particular note in this subversion repository (you did find it under the "online" link above, right?) is the makefile. With help from professor Geoff Kuenning of the CS department I built a makefile that will typeset and display my resume and cover letter as well as add new files to the repository automatically and publish my resume to the web using a really neat tar-ssh-tar piping trick.

That makefile is exciting to me, but I accept that many of my readers will find it less than enthralling, so if you want me to talk about it more just let me know and I'll be happy to talk more.

Good luck to all of you who have applied -- admissions letters are in the mail now! If you didn't get in to Mudd, take heart; that you even applied is a good indicator that you'll get into another top school. If you did get in, congratulations! Let me know if there is anything you want to hear about. I also host "prefrosh" or prospective students, so if you want to come by for another visit let me know and I'll make the arrangements to host you when you show up. Finally, if you're not yet a senior then thanks for reading and good luck next year; you should also let me know what you're interested in hearing about. (And if you're not a prospective student but a prospective parent, one of my parents or one of my friends, then just enjoy reading).

Fail
One last thing before I sign out -- in addition to fouling up the account creation with DreamHost for the Barnstormers, I also clobbered my external hard drive last night. It takes power from my monitor, because that's the only reachable powered USB port I have. I usually turn my monitor off when I leave my room, but this poses a problem when I have a large backup running to my external drive. The drive is formatted with the fat32 filesystem (eew, I know) and so that crash caused some fairly massive corruption.

Interestingly, my data was all fine (except for the stuff copying over at the time) but my OS suddenly decided that the filesystem was read-only if I tried to delete the corrupt files. I ended up fixing it by telling gparted to check and repair the filesystem twice.

~KMarsh

Apprentice Products Pitches Guitar Trainer to VC's

Apprentice Products. The name 4 HMC students gave the mock company they created for Professor Evans' "Enterprise and the Entreprenuer" class. Their flagship product: Guitar Trainer. A week and a half ago four of us sat across a table from three venture capitalists, all of whom have been successful enough in the startup world to fund startups themselves. Chris Seib, Marco Thompson, and Eric Johnson took the time out of their busy schedules to drive/fly to Mudd (yes, Eric flew himself and Marco in in from San Diego in his Piper Saratoga II, tail no. N392HP. No, I didn't fly back with them) and listen to a bunch of students organized into made-up companies ask them for $2-5 Million in funding.

The whole class was fascinating -- Professor Evans has helped many student-born companies get off the ground (some succeed, others...he calls them "smoking black holes") and he told us the stories of several of them, including why they failed or some of they things they did correctly that contributed to their successes.  He lectured on the different facets involved in building a startup company and the importance of paying attention to them all.  The pitch to the VC's was the final project and really the thing the class had been building to the entire time.  The VC's listened to our pitches and gave really great feedback -- they do this sort of thing for a living, so they're rather adept at it.  After class we went out to dinner at a fancy restaurant with Chris (an HMC alumnus, actually) and had a wonderful meal while chatting with him.  All in all, a really cool experience unlike anything I think I would have gotten anywhere else.

~KMarsh

Playing With Real Boy's Toys

My family went to my cousins' house in Redding, Ca. for Thanksgiving this year.  My uncle designed and built his house, an energy-efficient straw-bale home.  He owns a concrete fabrication business called Universal Precast Concrete, Inc.  We went out to visit the shop and got to play with some real man's toys.  Below are some examples:

Gary brought out his shotgun and let us shoot some clay birds.

It turns out I'm terrible with a shotgun.

Below is a really large CNC (computer numeric control) machine that Gary uses to cut molds out of styrofoam.  Once the molds are cut, they're sprayed with polyurethane.

The cement is mixed with a variety of chemicals, shown below, in the 1.5 cu. yd. mixer shown further below, to create the concrete that is then pored into the styrofoam molds yet further below.

Now we get to the most exciting part for me:  MIG welding.  Gary has a MIG welding rig that he let me play with.  He showed me how to lay a bead and let me play around with some scrap steel.

Here we see Gary showing me how leaving space between the plates when making a butt weld allows greater penetration of the weld metal.

The two weldments below are the sheets I practiced on when initially getting the feel for how welding worked (right) and the butt weld that Gary demonstrated the beginning of and had me finish.

Gary eventually got fed up with his workers breaking the hammer handles so he replaced this one with some #7 rebar.

To see more, with more complete descriptions, see the facebook album I posted with these pictures.  And Happy Turked Day.

~KMarsh

Moving Right Along

Now that my Quest for Graduation series of post titles is over, I have to express my disappointment in you, my faithful readers. You've had five weeks to tell me where that series came from and on one posted so much as a guess. For those who didn't know, the titles of the last five posts have been variations off the titles of the five games in Sierra's Quest for Glory series. These point-and-click, RPG-ish adventure games were some of the best I've ever played, despite their numerous bugs. Sierra, in its heyday, produced some of the most fun games I've ever played (circa 1990's). They are also some of the buggiest games I've ever played. The bugs were rarely showstopping*, but they certainly were noticeable.

In other news, I have acquired all the components for my Halloween costume and just need to put the finishing touches on a few parts before I'm ready. One of those parts is a capacitor about 2/3's the size of a AA battery. It scares the crap out of me, so I'm not doing anything with that component of the costume until I can get down to the electronics lab on Tuesday. Hopefully I can get all the soldering I need to do done then and just finish with the assembly and spray painting at my leisure. Now that I have tantalized you thoroughly, I take great pleasure in saying that you have to wait until Halloween to see it, like everyone else. Nyah nyah. Don't worry. I'm taking pictures as I go and I'll have plenty from the parties.

Speaking of the electronics lab, there's something cool going on this semester (and hopefully continuing on afterwards). A pair of students who are excited about learning more electrical engineering and getting an intuitive feel for electronic systems set up an informal lab period for interested students to come and play with the electronics lab. We do a little bit of instruction and mostly tinkering on projects of our own. I'm hoping they can help me with the bits of my costume that I don't have the knowledge to do safely.

Speaking of student-driven interest groups, I've got updates on the Barnstormers! Claire and I (co-presidents of the Barnstormers Aeronautics Club here at Mudd, if you'll recall) have been working with Iris Critchell to get the soaring trip going. We flew to Hemet and Crystalaire, where there are glider schools in operation, to see what was available and decide where we wanted to go. Larry Howell, the man in charge of "Sail Plane Enterprises" at Hemet really impressed us and offered us a great deal on pricing. He can only take 12 students a day, and only on the weekends, which is lower than the "Great Western Soaring School" at Crystalaire, but we liked the feel of his operation much more than the Crystalaire one, so we called him up and scheduled two trips. At least two of Claire, Iris, and I will be on each trip, so I'll make sure we'll get plenty of pictures and we'll have some wonderful stories.

See you after Halloween,

~KMarsh

*A glaring exception was Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness. This game had a glitch that made it impossible to progress beyond a certain point no matter what. Instead of releasing a patch or an update, Sierra provided a save file with the character located past this point so that players could see the end of the game, albeit with a different character than the one they had built up along the way.

Mad Science

IT LIVES!!! Well...I'm sure it would if I were a biologically-minded mad scientist, anyway. If you look back a few posts, you'll find that I planned on building a theremin and writing a plugin for calculating multilegged robot gaits in Blender 3D. Neither of these has happened. However, mad science finds a way, and I have two projects that are (mostly) done now:

• IR Goggles: Engineers learn that there is no such thing as perfection. Specifically, for my application, there is no such thing as a perfect band-pass filter. The human eye can be thought of as a system that produces a significant response to electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths between 4 and 7 hundred nanometers, peaking at about 550nm (green light). This band of the EM-spectrum is usually called "visible light" because, well, we can see it. The response is a curve, though. It's impossible to get a sharp cutoff in any system, and that includes our eyes. Thus, with a powerful enough source and some way to block all the "visible" light it becomes possible to see light classified as infrared (around 720nm). Your eye produces a very weak response to near-IR light, but it's still there and by blocking out all the visible light, we can actually see IR light. I don't have quite the right lighting gels, however. A friend had extra gels that she gave me and she had the correct "Primary Red" but not "Congo Blue". I tried it with the "Royal Lavender" that she had, but that doesn't actually block much more red than the "Primary Red". Thus I have very dark red sunglasses until I get my hands on some actual "Congo Blue" gels or equivalent.
  
• Tesla Turbine: Nicola Tesla was a mad genius. Probably my favorite historical figure, Tesla was a brilliant man who really had some great ideas. Many know him as the invertor of the Tesla Coil and pioneer of AC electricity, but he also built other things. The Tesla Turbine is a design for a bladeless turbine that uses a nifty property of flowing fluids known as the Boundary Layer Effect. In short, when a fluid is flowing across a surface, the molecules against the surface don't actually move. The next layer of molecules moves slowely and each further molecule moves faster until you reach the full speed of the fluid. Tesla, although fluid dynamics was not a field that we knew much about at the time, observed this and used it to make a pump to move mercury. He thought it was friction at first, but soon realized it was something else. He later ran it in reverse, pushing fluid through it in order to make it spin. The idea here, is that you take a bunch of disks and stack them up with very little space in between. You then put the stack in a cylinder and squirt a fluid on a tangent to the edges of the disks. The fluid "sticks" to the disks because of the boundary layer effect, transferring some of its energy to the disks. As it loses energy, it travels more slowly, so the radius of the circle it takes around the disks shrinks. It eventually spirals all the way to the middle where it reaches an exhaust drain. I made mine from CD's glued together with neodymium magnets and a small CD spindle. These turbines produce high rotational velocities, but rather low torque. I suspect that is the reason you never see them in modern applications even though they are more efficient than conventional turbines -- you normally want high torque.
  

Pretty good for the last two weeks of living here. I'm going home next Friday, but we're almost entirely packed right now. For those of you wondering why on earth someone would choose to live out of a bag in South-Central LA for a week (where you can't really go out to do anything without fear of getting shanked) I shall...well, at least rationalize my insanity. The apartment building tosses everyone out for 10 days at the end of summer. Why this is, I do not know, but Chris, Megan and I got some storage pods delivered and piled almost everything in the apartment into them. We are left with the one or two bags that we're taking home when we leave and the food in the fridge. Incidentally, this is why I don't have pictures of the tesla turbine being built -- they're on my desktop computer. It's out of commission until I get back to Mudd in August. I'm so bored this weekend....

Free at Last, Free at Last...

My thanks to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for this post's title. As of yesterday I am done with my junior year here at Mudd. All my classes are done, including exams/projects and I'm waiting until I move into my summer apartment on the 19th and start work. Of course...as a Mudder, having nothing to do is that pinnacle of the states of being that we all strive to achieve, but, being Mudders, having achieved it we're rather like my dog who once actually caught a rabbit that he was chasing and then had absolutely no idea what to do with it so it kicked him in the face and ran off again. We need things to do. Thus I have projects lined up to work on:

• Theremin: My summer roommate (a fellow roboticist and rocket scientist, possibly at the same time) has agreed to build a Theremin with me over the summer. Not because we can play music (although he's actually quite good with a guitar...mostly I can't play music), but because it oozes sciency sexiness. The theremin is a musical instrument played by waving your hands around it -- it consists of two antennae and some circuitry. One antenna controls the volume (closer your hand gets, the softer the volume) and the other controls the pitch (a variable-period oscillator is connected to the antenna and moving your hand changes the capacitance, altering the period of oscillation. This creates beats with a fixed-frequency oscillator and that signal is sent out to an amp). And I have friends who wonder how to make E&M sexy for high-schoolers.
• Blender 3D Robot Gait Plugin: Blender 3D is an open-source 3D modelling program. It has an extensive api and my friend Jacques over at Robots of Joy has realized the lack of good tools to let garage roboticists design walking gaits for multi-legged robots. Thus the idea was born to write a plugin for Blender 3D that lets the garage warrior build a model of his or her robot, animate it, and send out the commands for the motors when it's ready.
• Work: Oh yeah...I'll be working at Guidance Software in Pasadena. They do digital forensics. I'm not entirely sure what I'll be doing for them, but it should be neat. It will also be good experience working in the software industry.
  

And now for something completely different: I now have another reason to build a PC capable of playing modern video games (no, I won't leave you, 8-bit DOS games and buggy Sierra games, they're just prettier...it's really all superficial. You're still my favorites, I promise). It's called Mirror's Edge, and it's amazing:

I have Portal, Half-Life 2 (yes, I've never played it yet), and now Mirror's Edge on my list of compelling reasons to actually spend money on a decent computer. This game looks awesome. There are at least two things that are strikingly unusual about it. First, there's no HUD (on-screen display). Watch again. There's no ammo indicator, health bar, minimap, or any of the other elements you expect to get in between you and the world of the game. Second, your character's limbs are rendered, yet it's a first-person game. This is an attempt to make jumping decent in first-person games (perhaps the biggest complaint about Portal, actually). Finally someone has gone out on a limb and made what looks like a pretty good parkour game -- they did this by focusing on the parkour and not trying to add it as an extra like in Prince of Persia (decent games, but not great).

The game is set in something of a totalitarian dystopia where the government reads all electronic communications, so the only safe way to send illegal information is by using message runners. Your character is one of these message runners and, as seen in the trailer, the feds try to stop you. You can beat them up and even take their guns, but you only have whatever remains in the magazine when you take it and bigger guns will hamper your movements, so it's better to run away in most cases.

Mind you -- I still would rather do this stuff myself. I have a friend (who actually failed out of Mudd in a spectacularly epic way) who was learning some parkour and he showed me a little bit last time he came to visit. There's a decent spot to practice some of the basics on Mudd, but I'd like some other people to work with. Maybe I'll get a group together next year. For those of you who haven't seen it or don't know what parkour is, here's one of the more popular videos:

Actually, this would perhaps be better classified as free running (distinguished from parkour by its emphasis on acrobatics rather than efficiency), but either way it's really cool.

~KMarsh

Army of (Friendly) Robots

A few weeks ago the CS department used the colloquium period to tell us students what the professors would be working on over the summer. Professor Dodds' presentation included a slide proclaiming that he would be building an Army of (Friendly) Robots. He claimed this is because an Army of Robots should be on everyone's ToDo list, but helikes the thought of friendly robots more than the thought of unfriendly robots.

Last Thursday was the demonstration day for our robotics class. As you may remember, my team was intending to enter the Semantic Robot Vision Challenge, but unfortunately two of our 4 members were also taking VLSI which maybe sorta ate all our time and possibly our souls. We scaled it back so that we were only looking for textbooks, under the assumption that textbooks have very well-defined images, and did not implement the bounding-box stuff. Even so we were in the lab Wednesday night from 17:00 until class the next morning. We seemed to work best in shifts of two or three; you've heard that too many cooks will spoil the soup, and in this case there weren't enough different parts for all of us to work simultaneously on the project.

We each had "expertise" in a different area of the project, too; I knew how to make the wheels take the robot where I wanted it to go and had a good general feel for making Python talk to the different microcontrollers we were using (the ER1 Evolution base, the AcronameBrainStem controlling the servos, and the Arduino board controlling the sonar). Heather was the vision person and she did most of the work making our robot identify the books. Greg was the man who braved the dark waters of computer networking to get our MacBook Pro and Dell PC talking to one another via a short length of ethernet cable and even magicked up the campus network on the MacBook's wireless and shared it with the Dell. I don't understand such black arts, but he managed it. Ellen was the servo wizard. I bloody hated those things. They were built from magic and the desolation of lost souls and were even more finickey than the network to get right and always did something wrong if you looked at them cross-eyed, but she managed to bend them to her will somehow.

Next up we actually had to integrate all these pieces. We had a subversion repository full of code fragments that were each a proof of concept for controlling one element of our setup, but with three microcontrollers, two computers, and code written in both C and Python it was no mean task to get them all working together. In fact, it took all night. I was took the task of writing the main Python driver while Ellen was at a play rehersal and Greg and Heather worked on the vision code. I spend a good deal of time making it modular and following good coding procedures and I think that will really help anyone who decides to follow in our footsteps or really anyone who needs to figure out how to make any of these controllers work.

Once I had that put together, we hooked everything up, turned it on, and watched with bated breath as our robot ran headlong into a cardboard box. Turns out that the sonar sometimes returned a bad value and that would crash my program, so I caught the exception and ignored it -- potentially a dangerous thing to do, but it was a 30second fix and I was in a rush. After some confusion stemming from dead batteries powering the servos (did I mention how much I hate those things yet?) we actually got it running and completed the final tests around 07:00 Thursday morning. By this time Greg was passed out and Ellen had gone to bed leaving Heather and I to run the final tests and add in some amusing code of our own. Here is a video of our demo. Professor Dodds isn't the greatest of steadycam men, but it's probably the most exciting video of our robot so far. And for those of you who are wondering, Yes. The "Where are you hiding" is a tribute to the turrets in Valve's Portal.

~KMarsh

Old Engineers are Amazing

I just spent the last 40 minutes up to my elbows with a fellow student in the nether regions of a pinball machine. It's an old Adams Family pinball table that the student hangout and pizza joint recently acquired and it wasn't working; the ball would vanish down a little chute and should have been knocked to the side and then shot out. When the solenoid triggered to knock it to the side, though, the ball didn't move. We pulled the ball out to look at the chute and I found a light bulb from elsewhere in the machine had been knocked off and gotten stuck in the chute, preventing the ball from going through the hole in the side. We pulled it out and the machine worked.

Mostly. The screen didn't, which is kind of a pain. It appeared that everything else worked, so after some rooting around we discovered a key hanging inside the case of the machine that, once we tested it, opened the panel that the screen is on. We took it out and looked around to find a very smoky looking fuse -- we suspect it was blown when Ross zapped himself under the table, but we couldn't quite tell and didn't have a spare on us. We'll go back soon and check to see if that was it.

But the cleverness that you see in old mechanical things! It's really amazing what those old-timey engineers could come up with. Take the bumpers, for instance. They are a plastic or metal tube that the ball collides into. Around the base is a pressure switch that the ball presses when it hits the bumper. That switch triggers a solenoid (almost everything in the machine is a solenoid) that drops a metal ring from the top of the bumper. The ring is concentric with tube part of the bumper but slightly larger around so that it hits the ball somewhere on the bumper-side of the ball's center, forcing the ball away from the bumper. There was also a solenoid pointed at the side of the case. The best guess that Ross and I could come up with was that it was for making big thumps as sound effects.

~KMarsh

in Which Robots Rule the Post

In this post I was planning to talk about the career fair last Friday at which some fellow students and I pulled a great prank (with permission, of course), but then we decided to do the same thing on a bigger scale later so we're going to keep it hushed until then (read: check back in later for an awesome story). Robbed of its primary focus the post became very contrived and a rather dull discourse on how great the career fair is, ra-ra-ra, go Mudd.

That's boring.

Instead, let's talk about something cool: robots. With lasers. Got your attention yet? It only gets better. I'm taking CS 154, robotics, this semester and I have to say, building robots is just as cool as you hope it'll be. First off, the class is taught by Professor Zach Dodds who is just about the nicest person you could hope to meet. Not a particularly hard teacher and he doesn't give the same intimidating impression of towering knowledge and experience as some of the other professors here, but a really nice guy who really knows his stuff -- many of his stories are about robots he built in his college days that didn't end up working, but don't let that fool you: Dodds is a smart man with boundless energy. Dodds' research interest is in computer vision, which couples tightly with robotics. He's got a working NES in the lab with a Duck Hunt cartridge. The Duck Hunt light gun is strapped to a pair of servo motors that can point it at any spot on the screen and they are connected through software to a camera that watches the screen and controls the gun to play the game. It was built by some of his students several years ago and this year there are two teams using the Wii Remote as part of their projects.

He's also interested in cheap robots. While his robotic idols are Stanley and Boss, the autonomous cars that won the DARPA Grand Challenge and DARPA Urban Challange, he likes working with students on projects that cost very little, and still work well. A classic example is using a webcam and laser pointer as a low cost rangefinder -- true laser rangefinders cost thousands of dollars, but by using an off-the-shelf webcam and a cheap laser pointer it is possible to get very accurate range data. Couple that with some servos and you have quite a good ranging system. I told you I'd work lasers into it.

Just last summer three girls, all rising sophomores, did research with Professor Dodds and entered a competition. Their goal was to build a robot that would autonomously seek out and "capture" 6 colored markers. The capture was done by driving up to a marker and reading off the sequence of colors that made up the marker. They threw together an iRobot Create (the Roomba platform) with a Macbook on top of it and some legos holding up little sonars and a camera. I think the whole thing (except the macbook, which one of the students already owned), cost under $200. Almost all of their competition was teams of graduate students and the next cheapest robot was somewhere in the realm of $6,000. Our team of sophomore girls won the competition. And let the bruised egos of the mighty come crashing down.

I mentioned that I was taking the class, but I have yet to mention my project. My team's project is ambitious...possibly too ambitious. We're entering the Semantic Robot Vision Challenge. The goal is to build a robot that can receive a text file containing a list of objects and search for images online of those objects. Once it has a bunch of images it has to autonomously rove around a testing environment which contains many of the objects from the list, taking video or pictures of its surroundings. After touring the environment it has half an hour to sort through its video and select one frame that has each object in it, declare what the object is, and place a bounding box around it. So far we have a laptop on wheels. On the agenda this week is integrating the motors and vision together. For that we need to get the computer talking to the camera and some servo motors, then write software that will make the camera center on a region of a particular color using both the servos mounting the camera and the wheels turning the robot. Since we haven't gotten our short-range IR sensors or sonars working yet we can't really make it autonomous, but we're going to work on making it capture images and process them against a small database.

I'll keep you posted as this gets further along.

~KMarsh