Don “sigpfe” Piponi and His Cute Robots
Don Piponi, who writes on the web under the nom de web “sigpfe”, has written some amazingly clear papers on his blog, A Neighborhood of Infinity brilliantly explaining the elusive Haskell “Monad” concept. I’ll soon be blogging my own version of his stuff, with code in Lisp instead of Haskell.
I checked out his home page and found descriptions of some cute projects, including little home-made one-off robots that he has designed and created, called StirFry (autonomous motion avoiding obstacles), Equibot (balancing like a Segway), and OddJob (tiny autonomous robot that stops at black lines). There are fun videos of each. The links to the videos are at the bottom of each page.
He generously provides extensive instructions on how to make these, including some source code. I don’t know how hard real roboticists consider this, but from my point of view, as someone who has never done anything like this, it’s very impressive. Between this and the Monad papers (and others on his blog), this guy is so awesome!
August 8th, 2010 at 12:43 am
1. His name is Dan Piponi
2. He works as software developer at ILM, and before that – on Matrix movies at ESC. Which makes hims even more awesome
August 8th, 2010 at 1:48 pm
Sorry, I somehow fat-fingered the spelling of his name even though the title page of a paper he wrote was sitting right next to me. It’s fixed now. Indeed, that does make him even more awesome!