Matlab has long proclaimed itself as “The language of technical computing”. However its language leaves a lot to be desired.

Having worked with Matlab on and off for a number of years now, I am going to try and explain what could be improved:

• Error messages – usually vague and not helpful, and often difficult to find explanations for what a particular error message actually means.
• Programming experience – largely just a text editor. Something like Intellisense would go a looooong way to improving the experience.
• JIT compiler – a just-in-time compiler (much like Eclipse does with Java) would benefit the above point too. As Matlab variables are just matrices, you have to work out what size they are for yourself. There’s not even a way to annotate what size they should be so you don’t have to look it up later.
• Proper functions and objects – Matlab’s function definition system is backwards and annoying. The syntax is horrible too. Objects are (somehow) worse.
• Proper education support – this is something they could charge universities for and make a killing. However it will only work if the support is at the right level for students. If we’re learning a particular technique, highly technical docs are all well and good, but could do with some background as to how the parameters relate to the base technique.

Following near disaster over Christmas, I have resolved a hardware issue with the robot and got some impressive performance from it.

The robot uses a Kinect sensor for establishing its 3D environment. However e Kinect is designed to run eier off an Xbox 360 (the new one) power boosted USB variant, or off mains – neigh of these are good options for a mobile robot.

Howev thanks to some useful blog posts and a couple of email exchanges with various robotics colleagues around the world, it became apparent that cordless power drill batteries are ideal for driving the Kinect for sustained periods.

I have a Bosch 14v drill battery, which I stripped to its bare innards so it can fit inside the rather compact chassis. Over Christmas this system stopped working and I had to run the Kinect from mains, which is a non-ideal solution while trying out various algorithms of motion.

Today I had a check of the cables, charged the battery and checked the switches and it seems everything is back to normal and fully working. I was even able to get an astonishing 93 minutes of full-on Kinect use out of the not-quite-full charge, surpassing my own ambitious predictions by over 50%!

I will post full details of the Kinect setup for batteries at some point as I think others may fund it useful. It is also extremely cost-effective.

For the robot project I am using a MotorHawk board, which essentially provides motor control over USB.

Unfortunately the code that comes with it isn’t that great. I knew it was Windows only from the start, but when I had a closer look, it comes with a DLL, and sample applications in managed VB and managed C++.

If you’ve ever looked at managed C++ coming from a non-managed C++ background, you will know how ugly it is. I was not even able to get the project to build. So I set out with a couple of hours to get something nicer sorted out so I can hook it all into ROS eventually and get some real automation going on.

Amoeba-1, my robot for Project Origin which I have been working on, has had a major facelift.

Check out the photos over on Google+ as I dremel’d late into Sunday night and gave it a bit of an overhaul…

https://plus.google.com/photos/107164677276760163853/albums/5666781090277872897

My final year at Uni is well underway and therefore the Final Year Project must also be on its way.

This year my project is individual, and entitled Project Origin (named, if you must know, over the book forced upon underlings by Stargate’s Ori). Cryptic indeed.

In terms of actually doing things, check out the dedicated project website for more information. Here’s an excerpt from the Overview:

Project Origin aims to implement a robot system that uses the Xbox Kinect device as its primary sensing mechanism.

The Xbox Kinect is a cheap and highly effective sensor, integrating a RGB camera, depth perception system, and 4-device microphone array. While a lot of amateur and some academic work has put the Kinect to use, it remains to be seen whether the Kinect is the device to take robotics which aim to interact with our environment to the next level in terms of both sensing complexity and cost effectiveness.