Peter Morton, University of Sydney
Track: Tools & Tech; Audience: Intermediate
iOS devices and robots are a great combination. Touch input, high resolution screens, a plethora of sensors and network connectivity means that an iPhone or an iPad is a perfect tool for robot control and data visualisation. Unfortunately, reliable communications is a difficult task which, in the context of mobile robotics, can lead to safety concerns.
This talk will look at three communications technologies from a robotics point of view. We’ll start with the basics of sockets and look at some of the lessons I learn whilst writing applications for the Australian Centre for Field Robotics’s mobile research platforms. The second part of the session will be about “Bonjour” (aka “zeroconf”), a technology for service advertisement and discovery, and will show how this makes finding and configuring network connections easy. We’ll go step by step through creating an application that finds and connects to services on a local network, and show how services can be created and advertised on Mac, Linux and Windows systems – including a demo with crowd involvement.
The final part of the session will be about Bluetooth Low Energy, an exciting new technology built into the latest Macs and iDevices that allows them to talk wirelessly to peripherals using tiny amounts of energy. I’ll go over the basic concepts of Bluetooth LE, discuss how these are implemented in the CoreBluetooth api and then look at how this enables developers to create their own peripheral devices. We’ll finish up with some demos involving a mac, Bluetooth LE USB dongles and a Rapsberry Pi.
You can find code that accompanies the talk on GitHub: