David LaRose's SCS Home Page
Work
I work at the National Robotics
Engineering Center (NREC), which is part of Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. Our mission
is to get working robotics & computer vision technology out in the
world. Here are links to a few of the projects I've worked on:
- In the UltraStrip
project, we developed a robot to safely and effectively remove toxic
paint from the outside of ship hulls. This is an amazing piece of
engineering. The robot sticks to the ship hull using magnets, and
can even work upside down.
Last time I checked, this technology was in use at shipyards on three
different continents!
- I've done quite a bit of work in X-Ray/CT
Registration for medical applications. This project is an
extension of my thesis
work. We have a product-level suite of registration libraries,
which is available for licensing.
- We had a successful DOE funded project to develop automated
conveyor belt inspection software. The BeltVision system is
available for purchase from Beitzel
Corp. Special thanks to CONSOL
Energy, who funded the initial development of this system, and who
were partners on the DOE project. This is another project that's currently seeing commercial use.
I'll add links to other project pages as they become available.
Software
Here are some links to software I've written:
- dlr_libs
is a collection of libraries I initially wrote when I was consulting. I
wanted a common platform of unencumbered code for use with different
clients, so I wouldn't have to start from scratch each time. I use it
as a foundation for much of my software.
I've released it under a pretty
permissive license already, but let me know if you want different terms.
- This isn't really software, but here's a HOWTO I wrote on setting up a
simple network boot for stateless (Debian)
GNU/Linux boxes. It's
different from the average netboot setup in that the entire OS is in
the network boot image. This is good because you don't have to
have a seperate NFS partition hanging around, and because it makes it
easier to keep track of the state of the boxes you're booting.
This is bad because it pretty severly limits how much stuff you can fit
into the image.
- xComplete2 is an
X11 client that watches what you type, politely suggests completions,
and then fills in the ends of long (>5 characters) words and
variable names. It works with most X11 applications. This is a C++
rewrite of my original xComplete package. There are still a few rough
edges, but I'm using it daily as of August, 2006, so I'm confident
it's usable.
The latest release is 0.2 (as of June, 2007).
The Release notes give an
overview of recent changes. Here's a low-res screenshot.
[Update: recently, xComplete2 hasn't been playing nicely
with metacity (the default Gnome window manager). As of January 2010,
I am no longer using it. I'll fix it when I get some free time, but please
don't wait up.]
The latest release is 0.2 (as of June, 2007).
- psStamp is a script I wrote for adding
rubber-stamp-like overlays to postscript files. I wrote it because I
wanted a way to indicate which receipts should be billed to which account
at work. Simply forwarding the receipts with an explanatory note was
risky because the
email and the attached receipt could get separated. This script lets me
annotate my receipts in a way that's visually pleasing, clear, and fun.
Note that xpdf and
ghostscript provide good
ways of converting between pdf and postscript. The approach was
inspired by Johannes Hofmann's
flpsed
postscript editor. Here's an
example of psStamp output.
- Here are a couple of elisp files I hacked up to customize the
emacs modes for python programming and C++ programming. They both
contain examples of how to overload key presses in emacs, so that
functions are called automatically as you type. In each of these files,
I've overloaded the space key so that it inserts comments/punctuation
automatically. If you use both python and C++, start with the python
file, since it's a little less intrusive.
dlr-python-mode.el,
dlr-cc-mode.el
Fun Links
Check out the website for my amateur band, The Deceptions.
For those of you who are frustrated with the RIAA and other hooligans,
check out cdbaby for high quality
independent music with downloadable song samples.
Important Links
Last changed: May, 2010
