Cartographer Launch!

Yesterday, a project at Google that I've been putting a lot of work into launched! You can read about it on the Google Lat Long blog and a few other places of note.

Cartographer is a backpack that uses SLAM to build maps of the world in real time. The operator can annotate the map on the fly as they explore and then the results wind up on Google Maps. While the pack may be funny looking, we still love it.

The backpack has a desktop-class computer, a couple multi-echo laser scanners (30m range and 270° FOV), and an IMU. The map is displayed and annotated on an Android tablet.

Here's one of the first maps we launched:

Some of the system is built on ROS and my previous work on rosjava. Using ROS has been invaluable, especially during the prototyping stage. Our SLAM stack, however, is all home grown to meet the demands of robust, real time mapping on a fast moving, unstable platform (i.e. the operator's back).

Bot Commander r1 Released

I just published Bot Commander , the code for my Lego NXT rover . There's a lot left to be done, but release early and often, right? Currently it provides a UI for controlling the direction and speed of all three motor ports on the NXT brick. You can link motors together to adjust their speed in unison. In addition, you can enable "Tilt Control" for a steering-wheel-type experience. To use tilt control: Hook up motor A and B to be the left and right wheels of your vehicle. Hold the phone sideways (i.e. landscape). Tilt the phone forward and backward to drive forward and backward. Turn the phone right and left (like a steering wheel) to steer right and left. As you tilt the phone, you'll see the UI update the slider controls for the speed of motors A and B. I plan to expand the UI to provide a lot more than just motor control. Before that, though, I'll push a JAR to make it easy to integrate control of Lego NXT robots into your own Android project. The code

Email Injection

Not so long ago, I ran a wiki called SecurePHP. On that wiki, there was one particular article about email injection that received a lot of attention. Naturally, with all the attention came lots of spam. As a result, I disabled editing of the wiki and content stagnated. Still, the email injection article remained popular. About a year later, the server that hosted SecurePHP died and I never had a chance to hook it all back up. I saved the article though and I'm reposting it now. It may be a bit old (I've been away from PHP for a long time), and I didn't write all of it, so feel free to leave comments about needed updates and corrections. Though this article focuses on PHP, it provides a lot of general information regarding email injection attacks. The PHP mail() Function There are a lot of ways to send anonymous emails, some use it to mass mail, some use it to spoof identity, and some (a few) use it to send email anonymously. Usually a web mailform using the mail() funct

Android Recipes and Snippets

I've put together a small collection of Android recipes. For each of these recipes, this is an instance of Context (more specifically, Activity or Service ) unless otherwise noted. Enjoy :) Intents One of the coolest things about Android is Intents . The two most common uses of Intents are starting an Activity (open an email, contact, etc.) and starting an Activity for a result (scan a barcode, take a picture to attach to an email, etc.). Intents are specified primarily using action strings and URIs. Here are some things you can do with the android.intent.action.VIEW action and startActivity() . Intent intent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_VIEW); // Choose a value for uri from the following. // Search Google Maps: geo:0,0?q=query // Show contacts: content://contacts/people // Show a URL: http://www.google.com intent.setData(Uri.parse(uri)); intent.setFlags(Intent.FLAG_ACTIVITY_NEW_TASK); startActivity(intent); Other useful action/URI pairs include: Intent.ACTION_DIAL , tel://867530

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