Search Results for: Planck's law

The light we see is a mixture of different wavelengths in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The most common source of light is incandescence from a very hot body such as our sun or the filament of an old-fashioned light bulb. The spectrum, the amount of energy as a function wavelength, follows Planck’s […]

I ask Doug Baker what ethics says about robots making autonomous decisions to kill during combat and he responds by explaining the importance of moral agency. We also discuss progress in robotics as measured by Asimov’s three laws.

If your knowledge of dynamics is a bit rusty then let’s quickly revise the basics of second-order systems and the Laplace operator. Not rusty? Then go straight to the next section.

We will learn how to create coordinate frames that have smoothly changing position and orientation over time.

When a camera moves in the world, points in the image move in a very specific way. The image plane or pixel velocity is a function of the camera’s motion and the position of the points in the world. This is known as optical flow. Let’s explore the link between camera and image motion.

Actuators are the components that actually move the robot’s joint. So let’s look at a few different actuation technologies that are used in robots.

An image is a two dimensional projection of a three dimensional world. The big problem with this projection is that big distant objects appear the same size as small close objects. For people, and robots, it’s important to distinguish these different situations. Let’s look at how humans and robots can determine the scale of objects […]

We can also describe a blob by its contour or perimeter. Let’s look at how we determine the length of a blob’s perimeter using crack code and chain code. We can use the perimeter length to determine another scale and invariant shape parameter called circularity which indicates how compact, or circle-like, the blob is.

If it’s been a while since you last dealt with eigenvalues and eigenvectors here’s a quick recap of the basics.

We store movies in files, typically in an MPEG format. Let’s look at what’s inside one of those movie files, and how we can grab a frame from a movie as an image and put it into the MATLAB workspace.