Gav's uh, come to Gav's car and he's got. Look at this. it's a toys Turtle bot folks I Love it! This is I don't think they've officially finished this yet. I Pre-ordered on the hardware right? and I'm still waiting on the software, but it's a fantastic robot base.

There's encoders in the wheels there so you can very accurately estimate how far the robot goes right? It'll dock to charge which the previous one didn't which is very tricky. It's got a boost converter so I can power my Netbook straight off the same battery. Nice that that solves everything. And this guy is the exion which is like the Microsoft Connect oh I Was going to say it looks very similar to a Microsoft Connect it's a it's a full 3D camera so I can go around and make a threedimensional map of the environment.

y I can do a thing called slam which is where I estimate how far the robots gone and also make a map at the same time. So you're doing mapping is one thing. localization is another. Slam is when you try and do both simultaneously and get more accurate than either.

Got it alone. How does that track accurately on different surfaces though? Ah, so there's There's a gyroscope inside and if it notices the encoders are spinning really fast and the gyro isn't and it's not, it knows to ignore the gyro, ignore the wheels and right? Got it. Clever. And so what? Is this? a kit or what is it? This is a uh, demonstration robot from it's basically a simple test bed for the Robot Operating System Yep, um and it's it's all open source.

It's made by the guys at Willow garage who are the current maintainers of Open. CV The Vision Library Oh yeah uh, we're not worthy much. Off to these guys. Um, and I've been I've been playing with this.

it's it's absolutely fantastic to get into robotics. So w and how much I think it was about $1,800 delivered that includes a netbook, the 3D camera and it's a really nice Netbook so jeez, that's I'll have to show you that sometime. Dave when I've got it actually up and F up up and running and and there's and you can. it's just got shelves to fit other stuff on is that it's It's very extendable as well.

So I've made uh I've made a 3D uh laser that does time of flight to measure distance I've made something for that that will nod the laser up and down to turn a 2d slice into a 3D map. I've also made some other things like LED lights and just get it a bit more expressive. It's very, very extensible. So oh beautiful I Want one and it's it's look.

it's a lovely little turtle on there I Just want one cuz it's got a turtle and it's called the turtle Bot. Oh beautiful Thanks! G And we've got a funky looking camera rig here. Check this out. Tell us about this gav.

This is the Cin moo. um I Cinetics or possibly the other way around, right? Um, but if the battery weren't flat, it would be able to drive it itself backwards and forwards along this rail. And it's all about making smooth motion control and time lapse. so you could set up a DSLR on top.

Here you can have it slowly moving in front of things over the course of a couple of hours. You can see clouds whirling past. It's just adds a bit of extra dynamism to a time lapse. got it? And also you can take it off the rails and these will run perfectly well on a flat surface.

If I angle it like that, you could have a nice little swirling around someone, right? So it can follow a circular path. Absolutely. Absolutely a straight line. You could have it.

Um, it's this is all programmable and I'm pretty sure it's all Open Source Hardware and software so you could even make it do oscillations backwards and forwards if you wanted it for an interview or something. Yep, um fantastic. And how much does that kit cost? o All up this was just under $11,000 I think um but it's all all this screws apart. It comes with some some very nice little uh lanyard bags and things so you can transport.

put a the L backpack. um I'm very happy with the quality.