iCub humanoid robot updates on Facebook and YouTube. The photograph below was taken by Miguel A. Romero.

I would like to announce that we have just released a new version of Aquila, which has several new features such as new vision filters and transforms, GPU face and template tracking integrated with The Gaze Interface, new object recognition system for the MTRNN module, ERA (Epigenetic Robotic Architecture) module and more.

This is the last release of Aquila as a standalone toolkit encapsulating all modules. We are starting to work on a completely new design for Aquila 2.0. Please see this presentation and send me any feedback you might have. 

Aquila can be downloaded from iCub and the SourceForge repository that we use for the development. The latest updates are always on Aquila's FaceBook page, click here to explore it.

Over the last couple of weeks I have read many news articles covering The Synergy Moon and its plans to use NVIDIA's Tegra 3 system for its rovers, The Tesla Prospector and The Tesla Survivor. The articles were also referring to my previous collaboration (ESA version) with the European Space Agency and my PhD research for the for the ITALK Project supported by FP7 Programme of European Union and coordinated by my supervisor Angelo Cangelosi.

I can confirm that the rumours regarding our use of NVIDIA's Tegra 3 system were correct, however, I noticed that publishers often confused CUDA with Tegra 3. We are proud to work with Tegra 3 next-generation systems featuring quadcore processors, 12 GPU processors and one additional companion core. We are of course aware of the harsh conditions in space and on the lunar surface and I can assure you that we have got specific plans how to tackle this and protect Tegra 3 system in our rovers. Tegra 3 combines all the benefits we would hoped for such as low power consumption, small size and low weight and fantastic processing speeds. Tegra 3 also includes 12 GPU (graphics processing unit), which are great for processing parallel problems. My whole PhD research has been very positively influenced by NVIDIA's technology and also by NVIDIA's staff who encouraged me to carry on with my efforts.

Couple of years ago I read an article that used NVIDIA's CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) to implement neural networks running on GPU processors as opposed to standard CPU processors. The article inspired me a lot because it helped me to realise that GPUs are ideal for cognitive robotics research where we develop complex bio-inspired systems that are by nature parallel. I have started development of CUDA-based software named after constellation Aquila. Aquila has been very successful and helped me to demonstrate the power of NVIDIA's GPUs when used for cognitive robotics research. This led to couple of articles featured on NVIDIA's website and later to my visit to NVIDIA's headquarters where I did a presentation about my PhD research and involvement with The Google Lunar X PRIZE Synergy Moon team. Later, we received the Tegra 3 system and we are going to use it to develop state of the art AI system for the rovers.

NVIDIA has been a great inspiration and I have even started my own business (ProIS Group) that utilize the power of GPUs in the industrial sector. If everything goes well, The Synergy Moon team will launch two rovers controlled by Tegra 3 systems, which will be the first time ever when NVIDIA's products reached other celestial body. 

Press Coverage: 

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