For the second yearly experiments of the comets project, the airship Karma has been flying with two helicopters in Lousa, Portugal (see a short video). Megabytes of flight data and gibabytes of images are now waiting to be processed.

In the context of a robotics exhibition organized by the information technologies department of CNRS, the rover Lama will be on display in the CNRS headquarters during two months, with a couple of other robot brothers.

Sébastien Bosch will be working on the 3D modeling of an environment perceived with aerial monocular images acquired at very low altitude. Thomas Lemaire will tackle the air-ground coordinated navigation problem.

A new page in the photo gallery has been setup: it shows three panoramic images acquired with the Dala rover, and a short video filmed by Dala around the EDEN planet.

This video was recorded in May 2003, during some experiments of the european Comets project. You can find it in the Video page under the name 'Test flight of the new Karma'.

Karma-v2.0 is (almost) ready to fly. It has a brand new transparent hull designed by Zodiac, and a new home-made gondola. This new version of karma is 1.6m longer than its predecessor, all other dimensions being the same. This should let this blimp carry 3 more kg than the old version! Have a look at the photo gallery!

After a lot of research on finding the Right Movie Format, we have finally chosen MPEG-4. We have encoded our old movies and made them available in various size and compression ratio. You will be able to find a movie about the blimp, about Lama and its odyssey in 2001 and a very old one made by the BBC about Adam. There are also two technical movies on the visual motion estimation method and the potential field motion generation method. Unix users should be happy since they play pretty well with mplayer. Other users will be able to decode the movies with Quicktime.

The motion control page for rovers has been updated, detailing the recent work of Thierry Peynot. Follow the link on the navigation frame!

We finally have had the opportunity to test the blimp's flying capabilities using the remote control! Due to payload issues, we were not yet able to embed the cameras: the first flight was done with an overweight of 1.9kg, which appeared to be far too much in order to be able to really control the blimp. Three other flights have been successfully performed with an overweigth of about 1kg.
Also, a good news is that the rear stem thruster seems to be totally useless since the blimp becomes very controllable as soon as it has gained some speed. This makes almost 1kg of extra payload if we remove it!
Now, the next step is to set up the cpu and ethernet communication with the ground station in order to be able to log some data.

It is brand new, all red and black and looks very nice. The on-board PC has been called dala, because of Lama, and we are still thinking about a name for the rover itself. It will be equipped as soon as possible, and we all hope that it will be able to compete soon with its old brother Lama. Welcome aboard, Dala!

We've been thinking about it for a long time, and the rough design is finally done. The overall structure is setup and the look and feel is here. Much of the inspiration came from the NetBSD site; maybe those who know will find some similarities (they are quite well hidden now :).
Now, we just have to put some content inside before the first official release. Hope you'll enjoy it!