LeJos Robotics Repository...

...has been created using google code and can be viewed here . If anyone would like to be added to the project, please let me know.

The Beginning of a Tweetbot

Although in terms of setting up LeJos on mac osx 10.4 has been very pain staking today, we did manage to get the tweet bot up and running in it's basic form (although no interaction with twitter as of yet).

We have created a lego tweetbot code repository using google code and created twitter account for Tweetbot (if you wish to follow). We also wrote some basic code for communication. A good start to the project (if you discount silly problems hardware and LeJos related).

Here are the two bots that will be part of the tweetbot project

Daily Update Meeting - remotely

As Wadz is ill I facilitated the GIMS daily progress meeting. This was a good experience as it is crucial to ensure that order is maintained and everyone sticks to the 3 questions and answers as concisely as possible, otherwise chaos will ensue.

Also, due to being close to Christmas a lot of the guys are off, so the rightshore guys who were on site moved the tasks along and calculated burn down and burn up. This is also very good exposure and experience for them as they will have to take these skills back home with them and ensure that we work in this manner when the project moves into the next phase.

So all in all it was pretty good. It would be so much better if we had a web cam though.

Tweetbot 2nd stage

As chris pointed out the 2nd stage of the tweetbot would be to perform actions indicated by a request from the followers. This however is something that is quite tricky and will require a lot of thought to implement as understanding of language and semantics is required.

Retrospective

So we had our retrospective today, which was pretty good (I even got to facilitate). Four actions were determined and although we didn't meet our target the general consensus was that this way of working was definitely very good. People felt that they gelled better with the team and had a better understanding of where everyone fits in.

Tomorrow is our last virtual progress meeting then the new iteration begins in the new year. Bring on the new year :D

Tweetbot

Another idea I have had which I would like to incorporate in my robot is for it to state it's actions via twitter. I could set up a twitter account for the bot, then when it is running get it to tweet what it is doing and looking for in natural language over twitter. So, for example, take my final year intelligent robotics project where we created a robotic dog which would wag it's tail when stroked but stop wagging if stroked too hard, these are posts the bot could make over twitter.
Also the bot had a planning system in place and would scan for objects in order to find a ball and then use manhattan distance to bring it back to the 'master' again things we can tweet would be it's location, the object it is scanning (whether it's a ball or not), 'got it' when it has retrieved it and then how it is getting back to it's master.

So for my new bot, once it has been programmed up, I think it would be cool to try and implement something like this. Any thoughts?

Virtual Progress Meeting Over GIMS

So since a lot of us work from our home/base location on the Friday and every day we have a 15 minute progress meeting to highlight what we have been doing and any issues we decided to use GIMS (Group Instant Messaging Service, essentially a work MSN).

So this includes a 9 people conversation, obviously this can pose issues and can get very 'messy' so we had a chair who posed 3 questions:

1) What work did you do yesterday?
2) What are you working on today?
3) Any blockers.

Each person was asked in turn, type the answer, move onto the next person.

We had intended to broadcast the board via webcam (the locals in the office would have done this) but unfortunately  our work's network has blocked the webcam functionality which is a shame.

The meeting worked pretty well albeit a techy glitch at the beginning and if we can use VOIP and webcams it will be even better. I think using this approach today and hence forth on Friday's will be a good way of demonstrating that we can do this over a distributed environment (especially if we are to send work offshore).

The only disadvantages are if there are technical problems, the fact that we cannot at the moment use webcams and the meeting takes longer than 15 minutes as people are typing. Other than that it has worked pretty well as a pilot.

Since the webcam option is blocked, I have requested that the local guys take a pic of the board and the burn down chart and send it across to us so we can see the progress based on today's meeting.

It's been a lot better than I had anticipated.