RESEARCH

The reason we share our hardware and software with you is because you paid for it (well sort-of). NovemberKiloEcho is a non-traditional government contractor. That means we submit and receive grants to build systems that help save lives (seriously, we don’t build bullets, we build shields).

Hunter being our most recent accomplishment for Humanitarian Aid Disaster Recovery, there are a few exciting projects in the works. Some of them we can’t talk about until we get permission from our sponsors but the following are cleared or public knowledge.

The Robo-Magellan Competition

This is a program for “amateur” robotics adventurers to build a platforms to compete in a series of task completion activities. NKE, in partnership with Mania Labs are gunning to KILL this competition.

The DARPA Grand Robotics Challenge 2012 (humanoid)

We just submitted our proposal to develop an amazing humanoid robot that can walk, gallop, drive a car, and when it feels like it, lift said car. :-) . More on that if we get accepted into the competition.

Radio Frequency Locative

It doesn’t seem like this lines up with our focus on robotics, but the fact is GPS is NEVER going to be accurate enough for the systems we are designing. Using some very clever techniques we are developing an RF locative system that is accurate to 4cm in 3 axes, is immune to multipath, and runs on arduinos.

Low cost head tracking and gesture recognition

In our previous life, we created a motion capture system that uses IMU and RF technology to control things. We’re expanding that technology to control robots.

Open Source Hardware as a vision platform

Our platform of choice is the PandaBoard. This setup tutorial, this OpenCV tutorial addendum, and the following video are just a start. We’re going to provide all of the tools you need to build a synthetic vision robot to do your “evil” bidding.