A view to kill

Genome and proteome data from Hydra magnipapillata have opened the way for the molecular analysis of an ancient nervous system, which includes stinging cells, an unusual neurosensory and neurosecretory cell type. They hold some surprises for the mechanisms and evolution of sensory transduction that could not have been anticipated from what has been learned from flies and vertebrates. Research in BMC Biology now implicates the ancient opsin-mediated transduction pathway in the neuronal control of stinging cell discharge

The skyline as a marker for augmented reality in urban context

International audienceIn recent years, augmented reality (AR) technologies have emerged as powerful tools to help visualize the future impacts of new constructions on cities. Many approaches that use costly sensors and height-end platforms to run AR in real-time have been developed. Little efforts have been made to embed AR on mobile phones. In this paper, we present a novel approach that uses the Skyline as a marker in an AR system. This lightweight feature enables real-time matching of virtual and real skyline on smartphones. We use device's embedded instruments to estimate the user's pose. This approximation is used to insert a synthetic object in the live video stream. This first approach gives a very unrealistic impression of the viewed scene: the inserted objects appear to hover and float with the user's movements. In order to address this problem, we use the live video camera feed as additional source of information which provides a redundancy to the instruments estimation. We extract the Skyline (a set of pixels that defines the boundary between the building and the sky) as main visual feature. Our proposal is to use these automatically extracted points and track them throughout the video sequence, to allow synthetic objects to anchor these visual features, making it possible to simulate a a landscape from multiple viewpoints using a smartphone. We use images of the Lyon city (France) to illustrate our proposal

RoboCupRescue 2006 – Robot League, Deutschland1 (Germany)

Abstract. After scoring second in RoboCup Rescue 2004 with Kurt3D and participating in 2005 with two robots, namely Kurt3D and RTS Crawler, we concentrated on the development of interaction between both vehicles. Kurt3D is able to autonomously explore and map the environment in 3D and search for victims. The RTS Crawler is designed to access more demanding territory (i.e., red arena), working either remote controlled or semi-autonomous. The key innovation of this system lies in the capability for autonomous 6D SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) and 3D map generation of natural scenes, combined with the intelligent cooperation between robots that enables one operator to efficiently map and explore the whole arena. The robots are equipped with dedicated state of the art equipment, e.g., 3D laser range finders, infrared camera and CO2-sensor. Robots as well as operator station are rather compact and easy to set up. The challenge of controlling two rescue robots with only one operator is managed with a redesigned user interface and a number of autonomous and semiautonomous features