Day 12 - June 27th

By Mariëlla Verhage

After Singing the usual wake-up-songes(Gutemorgen sonneschein, wakker met een wijsje and so forth) it was time for a good nice breakfast at the lobby of the hotel. We went for a nice walk to the McGill University where we got a presentation about the Center of Intelligent Machines. It is a lab outside the the normal curriculum, and a very interdisciplinary centre full of emerging technologies, it fitted totally in the theme of the studytour. We got cool presentations about an underwater robot with 6 flippers. The robot was controlled by visual control, first with hand marks and the latest versions with fourier tags; circles with dark-light variations.
The robot named Aqua was 18,5kg but had natural weight in water so it could be controlled easily. It could last 3,5 hours on 1 battery and reached a maximum speed of 9 m/s. After having seen the robot and took a look at the idiotslist (all dumb actions done by students) it was time for the RMSlab in which a new kind of pick and place machine was designed but not with a very electrical engineering sort of control; it was done by a mechanical engineering student. Thereafter someone gave a very short but good presentation on haptics; it transfers feeling form the computer to your finger, the old shaking steerweel for the race games at the computer is an example of haptics.
Clark Verbrugge talked about the games part of the Center of Intelligent Machines. There is a lot of research going on in this subject; problems with distribution of databases, development process and graphics are arising. CIM also gives courses in games.
Hans Vangheluwe surprised us with his words of Dutch which were nice. He had designed a program in which models could be transformed into other models and into code.
Than it was time for a lunch in the foodcourt, the underground of Montréal, with student which was very nice. after the lunch we got demos about magnetic labetation (controlling a ball on ait in mm), heating sheets for thermal deformation and a program to design architecture for manufacturing with robots. The last presentation was about artificial perception. it is hard to implement that in robots because humans predict things based on earlier experiences. The system that was developed worked with 3D models of the world outside and on a LIDAR datapulses (a kind of echo). It was implemented in a helicopter and worked nice. the only problem was updating the models, therefor the system was redesigned on such a way that the system adapts the model on the LIDAR data. We got a demonstration of the LIDARstuff in which they had whole Montr\'eal in dots, very cool!
The afternoon was free time so most of the group went chilling in one of the parks in Montr\'eal. The dinner was also free and at 9 o'clock we got a tour with the amphibus. As the name marks clear, we first got a part of the tour through old Montréal (very nice) and after that we drove into the water. The tour guide had a lot to say about all the old buildings and history. At 10 o'clock the big, very big fireworks begun on music which was amzing; it lasted for over half an hour!
When we drove back over the safe streets and stepped out of the bus the whole group went singing from our Codex back to the hotel, having a lot of fun and going to have a nice piece of rest that night.