Welcome to Raymond's Website!

My first ever book, "Watch for Robots", is now ready for sale! In it, you'll find some of my best photos from the last two years of Rescue Robotics events - from the Response Robot Evaluation Exercse (#3) at the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue training facility in August 2006 through to the 4th Rescue Robotics Camp at the Istituto Superiore Antincendi in Rome in September 2007. You'll also find descriptions of all the 36 robots featured plus the various events.  

"Watch for Robots" is available in both softcover and hardcover with dustjacket. The current list price is $39.95USD for the softcover and $51.95USD for hardcover. Shipping varies, to Australia it's around $10.00USD. However, Blurb also runs various promotions such as $10 off, 20% off or the like so you can get this book considerably cheaper - head on over to http://www.retailmenot.com/view/blurb.com to check out what offers are currently available! 

To order your copy, please visit http://WatchForRobots.raybot.net or click the book icon below.

Perfect as a gift for anyone interested in robots, technology and photography! ;-)

Watch for Robots

A Glimpse at the Early Childhood of Rescue Robotics

By Raymond Sheh

Book Preview

Another October, another Rescue Robotics camp! This year the camp was held almost 4 weeks early to coincide with the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's International Workshop on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics, both hosted by Istituto Superiore Antincendi, about 6KM south of Rome. I was fortunate enough to be invited back to help out at the camp, where I was mainly attached to the Flying Robots practical. I also presented our paper on terrain feature extraction to the SSRR workshop. Oh, and I took almost 5,000 photos! :-)

If you're looking for more photos from the event, have a look at http://rrc07.raybot.net/ !

We had a great showing with practical sessions about robot simulators with NIST, walking robots with the University of Pennsylvania, flying robots with Ascending Technologies, shapechanging advanced mobility robots with Chiba Institute of Technology and Tohoku University and 3D mapping and modelling with the University of Rome "La Sapienza"!

Once again the great organisation effort by the teams from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" under Professor Daniele Nardi, the National Institute for Standards and Technologies under Adam Jacoff and International Rescue System Institute under Professor Satoshi Tadokoro paid off.

As this year's camp was held much earlier than usual, we could not be accommodated at the Institute ... I ended up at the Hotel Pace Elvezia, a short walk from Piazza Venezia in the middle of Rome ... and boy am I glad I ended up there! I got to see a lot more of Rome than I did in the past simply by taking detours to and from the metro station each day ... I should go through the 2,700 photos I took around Rome (not including the 2,000 or so photos I took during the actual events!) soon and put some of them up - in the meantime I've got a few up at my Flickr page! :-)

More robots! After the 2006 Response Robot exercise at the Maryland Task Force 1 training facility, NIST kindly invited me to another exercise, this time at the Texas Engineering Extension Service's Brayton Fire Training Field, for another chance to be on the other side of the fence (usually I'm operating the robot, this time I got to be the evaluator!). Once again I was on the ramp test - where the robots had to drive a fixed pattern on a sloping platform with different types of surfaces and we timed how long it took for each robot. And of course, I got to meet up with a whole pile of old friends (including good ol' Brutus, the search canine, brought to the event by handlers Tom and Lee Haus) and made a pile of new ones! Thanks for the great time!  

I got heaps of photos as well! See http://nistrobots-june07.rsheh.raybot.net/ :-)

Wheee! 14 flights, 12 stops, 5 official events, 4 universities, 2 hire cars, 1 really good holiday and many many new friends ... how is this for a trip? Between the 15th of June and the 27th of July I managed to squeeze all of these in:

1. Fly to College Station, Texas (via Los Angeles and Dallas Fort Worth) for the NIST/DHS Response Robot Evaluation Exercise #4
2. Fly to Corvallis, Oregon (via Dallas Fort Worth) for the International Conference on Machine Learning at Oregon State University
3. Drive to Rockaway Beach (booked an "economy car" via Hertz and got a Prius with all the fruit!) for lunch with a good friend
4. Fly to Atlanta (via Dallas Fort Worth - where we got stuck for 24 hours due to bad weather!) for the Robotics: Science and Systems conference, RoboCup 2007 and the RoboCup Symposium at Georgia Tech
5. Fly to Tampa, Florida to visit the Center for Robot Assisted Search and Rescue at the University of South Florida - and to meet up with friends!
6. Drive to Fort Myers to get a jump on the traffic and visit the summer residences of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford (and fix their penny crusher!)
7. Drive to Key West, Florida, watching the sun set on the way (ya, we mistimed it, we were going to try and get there for the sunset)
8. Drive to Cape Canaveral to visit the Kennedy Space Center!
9. Drive to Orlando for DisneyLand and Universal Studios!
10. Fly to Las Vegas via Dallas Fort Worth to see the Grand Canyon and Cirque du Soleil's production of "O"!
11. Fly to Los Angeles to see Hollywood!
12. Fly to San Jose to meet some friends, visit Google, Stanford University, NASA Ames and the Golden Gate Bridge

Let's just say after all that I was pretty exhausted ... but it was great fun! Now to dig up all those photos ... per-event blog entries to come ... maybe ... yes I know, I haven't updated in 8 months or so, this is the backlog ;-)

Ah so it's Christmas again for another year!

For the first time in a long time, I went to a Carols by Candlelight event about a week ago ... I was especially amused at the following adaptation of "Jingle Bells" to the Australian way of life!

Dashing through the bush
In a rusty Holden ute
Kicking up the dust
Esky in the boot
Kelpie by my side
Singing Christmas songs
It's summer time and I am in
My singlet, shorts and thongs

CHORUS:
OH! Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells
Jingle all the way
Christmas in Australia
On a scorching summer day, Hey!
Jingle bells, Jingle bells
Christmas time is beaut!
Oh what fun it is to ride
In a rusty Holden ute

Engine's getting hot
Dodge the kangaroos
Swaggy climbs aboard
He is welcome too
All the family is here
Sitting by the pool
Christmas day, the Aussie way
By the barbeque!

CHORUS

Come the afternoon
Grandpa has a doze
The kids and uncle Bruce
Go swimming in their clothes
The time comes round to go
We take a family snap
Then pack the car and all shoot through
Before the washing up

CHORUS

Unfortunately, not even a reasonable amount of Google-fu was able to find an original author of this variant (it does appear on a pile of websites but none claim to be the original author nor do they cite to the original author) so until I find out more I'll need to credit it to that prolific bard, "Anonymous". Of course if anyone has a verifiable lead on who the actual author is, please do drop me a note!

I think I'll leave it there for a while so the non-Australians reading this can be thoroughly confused before posting some clarifications! ;-P

UPDATE: Thanks to Craig Howie from CSE/UNSW for letting me know who the original author was! These lyrics were written by Colin Buchanan in 1992 (www.colinbuchanan.com.au). He did an ABC story on this in 2002, see http://www.abc.net.au/backyard/stories/s740561.htm for details!

So, in talking to people from the US, one thing that sometimes comes up is how big Texas is (eg. the phrase "As big as Texas" or, as I've heard at least once, "Texas: It's bigger than France") ... and the inevitable Alaskan comeback (Alaska being over twice the size of Texas). One thing that I keep coming up against is that a lot of people don't seem to realise how big Australia really is (and get all surprised when I say it takes 5 hours to fly from Sydney to Perth) - being somewhat closer to the equator I guess the land mass isn't as stretched out on a map. 

So I jumped on Wikipedia and had a look ... here are some interesting land areas that (in my experience) often come up in discussions on this topic (all in km squared, multiply by 0.3861 for miles squared).

Now I make the point that I'm not saying the Australian Antarctic Territory is equivalent to Alaska, the former having no permanent population and thus no government or legislature, but a lot of people don't realise that this area is still "officially" Australia (according to Wikipedia it's a true Australian territory - presumably like the Northern Territory is part of Australia, although due to international agreements Australia doesn't actually exercise sovereignty over the AAT) - Australia even issues postage stamps for this area. But yes, Texas is bigger than France. Just. :-)

Oh and for those who are confused about Kalgoorlie and Murchison-Eyre, an Australian Electoral Division is represented by one member of the Australian federal (national) parliament whilst a Western Australian Electoral District is represented by one member of the Western Australian state parliament.

After 2 weeks of sorting through almost 1,000 photos from the Rescue Robotics camp, I've finally uploaded them! Head over to http://rrc06.photos.rsheh.raybot.net/ (or follow the photography link on the left)! :-)

Another year, another brilliant Rescue Robotics Camp, thanks to the efforts of Adam Jacoff, Daniele Nardi and Satoshi Tadokoro, the team from NIST and the University of Rome and all the lecturers, practical leaders and participants!

For those of you waiting for my photos from the event, sorry I haven't had a chance to go through all of them yet - if you send me some email I'll add you to the list of people I'll be notifying once that happens! In the meantime, here's a poster I made of some of the images! :-)

I've got a high resolution poster-printable version as well, send me some email if you want it! I've also made a timelapse video of the demo day, the small version is here (about 4MB) and the large version here (about 16MB).

Thanks to Haldun and Joel for the use of their window, from which this movie was shot!

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, the Rescue Robotics Camp brings together students (mainly graduate students) and researchers in areas relevant to Urban Search and Rescue Robotics for a week of intense investigation, practical work and demonstrations, held at the Istituto Superiore Antincendi (Firefighters Training Institute) in Rome!

I saw snow falling for the first time whilst riding my bicycle home yesterday! OK so trust me, those little white dots you see in the light are snowflakes :-)

No, Perth and Sydney haven't frozen over (in fact it looks like they're having a bit of a heatwave over there (even by Australian standards!) ...

Since the end of July I've been on the other side of the world (literally - a back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that if I drill a hole through the middle of the Earth from here I'll come out about 400km off the coast of Perth), visiting the Field Robotics Center of the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh as a "Visiting Scholar" ...

I'm working partially on things like literature reviews for my Ph.D. and partially on their Trestle project, which aims to develop techniques to co-ordinate a team of robots in order to assemble structures in space. For this, I'm doing some development work on a simulator, based in the Gazebo robot simulation package, and am investigating ways of developing control policies based on observing how humans perform tasks. Exciting stuff! :-)

Now excuse me whilst I order another pair of flannel-lined jeans ... it can get cold riding to and from home in below-zero (that's Celsius) temperatures on a regular basis!