RoadNarrows LLC
2011
Volume 7
LOVELAND, COLORADO, 7 July 2011 -
Colorado Medical Technologies (CoMedTec) and RoadNarrows LLC have leveraged Gumstix® technology and RoadNarrows' expertise in vision processing and embedded systems to quickly develop and prototype WoundZoomTM, an innovative and intelligent image-based sensor for characterizing open wounds.
CoMedTec chose RoadNarrows for the development of the product from their extensive experience with Gumstix and embedded Linux vision systems. RoadNarrows developed related technology for a legged robot “brain-and-sensor pack” platform funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant Number IIP:0848762. Real-time image processing and image understanding technology on a mobile platform has many diverse applications such as educational robotics and mobile medical devices to characterize and image open wounds.
Open wounds are a common type of injury in which the dermis and epidermis, i.e. the layers of skin that protect the body against infection and disease, are broken or damaged. The healing process of an open wound is complex and can be highly sensitive to a variety of environmental and health factors. This makes the effective treatment of open wounds very challenging. To evaluate the efficacy of a treatment, and to adapt treatment to an individual patient's needs, it is important track the wound from week to week (e.g. by measuring the area and volume of the affected area).
Many methods of wound measurement that are currently used by medical professionals require physical contact between the patient and the clinician. For example, some techniques require a ruler or grid to be placed on the skin of the patient, directly over the wound. These measurements are inaccurate, hard to repeat, and can vary significantly between between measurements by two different clinicians.
The WoundZoom device offers significant advantages over traditional wound measurement techniques by taking advantage of intelligent image processing and advanced software algorithms. Measurements taken with WoundZoom are:
The device is easy to use, making the measurement of wounds nearly automatic while allowing experts to adjust the measurements at their discretion. WoundZoom is highly portable, and can be used for patients of in-home-care and in the field. All measurements taken by WoundZoom are stored in standard electronic records that can easily be integrated with other Electronic Records Management (ERM) systems. The technology is licensed by CoMedTec from the Georgia Institute of Technology, conceived by the Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access (CATEA).
Gumstix technology played an important role in the development of the WoundZoom prototype by allowing RoadNarrows engineers to quickly integrate a variety of off-the-shelf components into a cohesive hardware platform. Rapid hardware integration and high-quality components, such as Gumstix Overo® Computer-on-Modules (COMs) equipped with TI OMAP processors, and e-con System's 5 Megapixel camera board e-CAM50_OMAP_GSTIX were crucial in keeping the WoundZoom development on time and within budget.
About Colorado Medical Technologies
CoMedTec specializes in the development and marketing of products for the assistive technology and woundcare markets. CoMedTec offers consulting services to companies and individuals who want to: Evaluate the market potential of new technologies; Develop marketing strategies for new or existing products; Manage or facilitate the development of new products.
For more information about Colorado Medical Technologies and WoundZoom , visit:
www.woundzoom.com
About RoadNarrows, LLC
Based in Loveland, Colorado, RoadNarrows is a privately held robotics and technologies company founded in 2002. RoadNarrows sells and provides technical support for some of the most popular robotic product lines used by the academic and research community world-wide. RoadNarrows Research & Development develops intelligent peripheral components and accessories, including cameras, mobile sensor architectures, and open-source platform software to give robotics researchers advanced, time and resource saving tools. RoadNarrows has been a Value-Added Reseller (VAR) of Gumstix products since 2009.
For more information, visit:
www.roadnarrows.com
About Gumstix, Inc
Founded in 2003, Gumstix, Inc. of San Jose California develops, manufactures and markets tiny Linux® computers and related products to customers located in more than 50 countries worldwide. Design engineers integrate Gumstix technology into power management, location sensing, data collection, time and attendance, military, security, and robotic applications.
For more information, visit:
www.gumstix.com
About e-con Systems, Inc.
e-con Systems is an end-to-end product development services company with a strong technology expertise in cameras. e-con Systems offers a variety of camera solutions like reference designs, camera modules with customizable lenses, camera driver development, image quality testing, image tuning and camera-based product design services. e-con systems currently has two camera module solutions designed for compatibility with Gumstix® Overo COMs.
For more information, visit:
www.e-consystems.com
About The National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year (FY) 2010, its budget is about $6.9 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 universities and institutions. Each year, NSF receives over 45,000 competitive requests for funding, and makes over 11,500 new funding awards. NSF also awards over $400 million in professional and service contracts yearly.
For more information, visit:
www.nsf.gov
LOVELAND, COLORADO, 19 May 2011 -
RoadNarrows LLC, a Northern Colorado-based robotics and intelligent systems company, has been awarded a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research Program grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF award will allow RoadNarrows to develop a scalable computer framework for intelligent systems applied to high-performance robotic arms. The project is being led by co-founder and CEO Kim Wheeler.
A significant part of the effort is to address the computational challenges involved in developing a new generation of intelligent robotic manipulators. Real-time general vision processing and dexterous planning, for example, are not feasible using conventional embedded processors. The consequence is that advanced robotic applications are only possible in environments where the robotic arm can outsource computationally expensive processes to more powerful computers. Low-power, High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters will be used to extend what is currently possible in autonomous and semi-autonomous robotic manipulator systems. The goal is a highly capable, computationally scalable, low-cost intelligent robotic arm platform for research and light industry, which can easily be adapted to a variety of complex applications.
This project will fill a market niche between the low-end robotic manipulators that have little commercial potential and the high-end robotic arms that are expensive and have high operating costs for setup and operation. High-performance computation integrated with advanced robotic manipulator systems are applicable for agile light industry and other desktop manipulator applications in unstructured environments. This will have a tremendous impact on the future of commercial robotics and make capable robotic systems affordable to small manufacturing businesses. Highly parallel computing power will greatly increase the range of applications and environments to which robots are suited. For example, an intelligent robotic manipulator can be used in agricultural applications or autonomously caring for plants in highly unstructured environments. The same manipulator could easily be adapted for use in a classroom setting; with a simple scripting interface students can experiment with advanced robotic control, allowing them to concentrate on discovering exciting new applications. This creates a broad market in academic and industrial settings,both for highly-capable, low-cost intelligent robotic manipulators for agile manufacturing and for low power HPC clusters applied to sensor network integration solutions in general.
Robin Knight, co-founder & CTO at RoadNarrows states, "In the current industry, there is a gap between the low-end robotic arms designed as toys or introductory research vehicles that offer a limited shelf-life, and the high-end industrial products which sell for tens of thousands of dollars. With the outcome of this grant work, it is our intent to provide a family of affordable, high quality robotic arms whose form, function, and price are perfectly matched for education, research, and light manufacturing."
The robotic manipulator, named Hekateros will, excluding the end-effector, will have two different configurations. One is a a four degrees of freedom (DOF) arm mounted on a fixed base, and a five DOF arm including a rotating base respectively.
All Hekateros arms have a well-defined, standardized, open-source end-effector interface located at the end of the continuously rotatable wrist. Various in-house developed end-effectors will be supported. In addition, third-party innovators may readily develop function specific end-effectors for education, research, and agile manufacturing through the Hekateros end-effector open architecture. The research for the SBIR Phase I project will begin July 1, 2011, and end on December 31, 2011.
About RoadNarrows, LLC
Based in Loveland, Colorado, RoadNarrows is a privately held robotics and technologies company founded in 2002. RoadNarrows sells and provides technical support for some of the most popular robotic product lines used by the academic and research community world-wide. RoadNarrows Research & Development develops intelligent peripheral components and accessories, including cameras, mobile sensor architectures, and open-source platform software to give robotics researchers advanced, time and resource saving tools.
For more information, visit:
www.roadnarrows.com
Media contact: 800.275.9568
"RoadNarrows" is a trademark of RoadNarrows, LLC, all rights reserved.
NSF GRANT SUPPORT AND DISCLAIMER - The project described above is supported by Grant Number 1113964. from the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
LOVELAND, COLORADO, 19 January 2011 -
RoadNarrows initially developed BotSense as a means of supporting their diverse robotic systems, which were being coupled with increasingly varied intelligent sensors and embedded devices. In the two years since initial development began, BotSense has grown to provide a fully unified, virtualized framework for local wi-fi and remote Internet management and control.
The latest release, BotSense v3.0.1, improves upon previous versions with: a more coherent hardware abstraction layer; XML-specified, network-safe message auto-generation; server side dynamic linked plug-ins; and client side support for C/C++ and python. BotSense v3.0.1 is readily extensible to include support for other programming languages.
Robin Knight, co-founder and CTO at RoadNarrows states, "BotSense provides a simple, intuitive framework with well-documented open interfaces, and can easily support a wide variety of embedded devices. It can serve as an alternative to more complicated, feature-rich frameworks when simplicity and speed of development are desired."
For robotics researchers and developers, BotSense enables rapid development and deployment of sophisticated robot control applications built against a consistent, intuitive, open API. It supports many of the devices commonly found on educational and research robotic platforms, such as: infrared, sonar, and laser range finders; cameras, motor controls and actuators, grippers, and end-effectors. BotSense is designed to support additional proxied devices, which can be added by developers using the open and documented programming interface.
BotSense offers a logical development and run-time environment:
The aim of BotSense is to create an IP-based, open-source, near real-time, client-server middleware framework that readily supports multiple computing architectures including embedded processors with limited resources. The proxy server supports concurrent clients. Both request-response and streaming-out message exchange patterns are supported. The extensible framework supports new application-specific proxied (pseudo) devices and robotic systems.
Current and upcoming platforms to be supported include the Khepera III robot with a KorebotII board by K-Team S.A., RoadNarrows' Hekateros robotic manipulator with a gumstix Overo(TM) processor, RoadNarrows' SkewlZone legged robot platforms, and RoadNarrows' RoboSight(TM) neural network camera.
This work was funded in part by the National Science Foundation SBIR/STTR Phase II grant #0848762, a collaboration between RoadNarrows LLC and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
About RoadNarrows, LLC
Based in Loveland, Colorado, RoadNarrows is a privately held robotics and technologies company founded in 2002. RoadNarrows sells and provides technical support for some of the most popular robotic product lines used by the academic and research community world-wide. RoadNarrows Research & Development develops intelligent peripheral components and accessories, including cameras, mobile sensor architectures, and open-source platform software to give robotics researchers advanced, time and resource saving tools.
For more information, visit:
www.roadnarrows.com
Media contact: 800.275.9568
"RoadNarrows" is a trademark of RoadNarrows, LLC, all rights reserved.
LOVELAND, COLORADO, 3 January 2011 -
RoadNarrows Robotics was recently selected to participate in the Autodesk Clean Tech Partner Program, which provides software for emerging clean tech companies in North America and Europe. Early-stage clean tech that companies can benefit from Autodesk solutions for Digital Prototyping are invited to apply to receive up to $150,000* worth of software for only $50. Access to a collection of Autodesk industry-leading software applications includes up to five licenses of AutoCAD Inventor Professional Suite, Autodesk Showcase, Autodesk Vault Professional, Autodesk Revit Architecture, Autodesk Alias Design, Autodesk Algor Simulation and Autodesk Inventor Publisher software.
RoadNarrows will use Autodesk Inventor Digital Prototyping software to advance our tradition of excellent design and production. From hydrogen fuel cells to low-power computing clusters and energy-efficient refrigerators, RoadNarrows is committed to delivering high-quality custom products while keeping our environment healthy.
Visit RoadNarrows online at: www.RoadNarrows.com
Learn more about the Autodesk Clean Tech Partner Program at: http://www.autodesk.com/cleantech
*Value is based on up to five commercial licenses of each application.
Autodesk, AutoCAD, Algor, Alias, Autodesk Inventor, Inventor, Revit and Showcase are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries and/or affiliates in the USA and/or other countries.
"RoadNarrows" is a trademark of RoadNarrows, LLC, all rights reserved.