Over the past few weeks there have been several articles across the internet about my work on getting robots to plug themselves in to regular wall outlets by sensing the electric field that they naturally emit.

Travis Deyle posted a nice article on his robotics blog that sums up most of the efforts so far to get robots to plug themselves in, including my work with Marvin and E-field sensing.

This evening, I was working my way through the blogs and news sites that I usually read, when I came across this hack-a-day article.

This video, which I shot and narrated, shows Marvin plugging himself in and explains the sensing procedure:

The paper describing this research will appear at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation this spring in Anchorage, Alaska.

I shot this time lapse of a cyclamen blossom opening on my coffee table this afternoon.

If you’re reading the datasheet for a MEMS barometric pressure sensor, do you really need an equation to tell you that dividing by 4 and multiplying by 0.25 are equivalent? Apparently some technical writer thinks this needs to be explained…

The datasheet then goes on to indicate that dividing a temperature value by 20 is the same as multiplying it by 0.05. Darn, this math stuff is tricky…