Hannibal

Hannibal

Hannibal was built in the Mobot Lab during the 1990’s as an experimental design for planetary exploration. The robot was designed with 6 legs as opposed to tank treads, or wheels, due to the fact that this allows the robot to traverse difficult terrain more effectively. This also allows them to have the potential of loosing a leg and still being able to move. The robot was built with 19 degrees of freedom, 8 microprocessors, and over 60 sensory inputs. The sensors are used by Hannibal to decide how to move its legs when it encounters difficult terrain.

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Urban Challenge

The former George Air Force Base in Victorville, Ca. was home to the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge on November 3. DARPA is a competition between 11 finalists to created an autonomous vehicle able to drive in traffic amongst other challenges to claim a one million dollar prize. Mesa State College was invited to the final with a XTerra created by Team Mojavaton. DARPA was the result of a Congressional decision stating that by 2015, 1/3 of all military vehicles are to be capable of “autonomous driving.”

Animation

This is a still of the animation from my homework page of the animation

created using the Gimp software. I opened the image and selected the wave animation from the drop down menu. I decreased the rate of animation so as not to obscure the image completely. I chose this animation due to the water references from the book.

Here is the link to my website to view the Stranger In A Strange Land Animation, http://home.mesastate.edu/~jmccammo/Homework.html

5 Effects

These 5 images were altered using The Gimp photo editing program. The styles I chose were Lens, Mosaic, Fractal, Jigsaw, and Page Turn. For each I opened the image in Gimp, selected the effect from the Filters drop down menu and saved the file as a .GIF file.

This is the link to the flickr account, http://www.flickr.com/photos/25282790@N06/

Transparent Photo

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25282790@N06/

The transparency was created using The Gimp photo editing program, after opening the image in the program selected the image using the rectangle icon from the editing pallete, then selected animation from the Layers drop down menu. At this point I chose the eraser icon from the palette and the add alpha channel and erased the background from the image leaving only the book itself then saved the changes as a .GIF.

The above hyperlink takes you to my flickr account.

I was unable to post this photo and have the transparency translate onto this blog but it can be viewed on the homework page of my website.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has a great page dedicated to RAH. In the discussion section of the page a I recommended that page with all of his published works be listed with a simply 1-2 sentence review for each be posted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Robert_A._Heinlein#Book_overviews.3F

Top 3

These are three of the best works by Heinlein in my opinion. A photo of each work is on flickr.com; 

Time Enough For Love

Stranger In A Strange Land 

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls 

Each of these photos was uploaded with the Creative Commons license allowing anyone to use or change the photos, as they are simple photos of each book's cover. The tags for each photo are:

1. My blogs address

2. Robert Heinlein: the author of the work in case a search is done by name

3. Science Fiction: for searches done for the genre

4. Books

5. Future History: a classification for a group of his books that are intertwined to a certain extent.

The Dean of Science Fiction

Here is a quick podcast that talks about the RAH's early life and accomplishments prior to becoming published as well as awards. Enjoy!

http://mesastate.edu/~jmccammo/heinlein.mp3

The podcast was created using an external microphone and the Audacity program.

(Image taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinlein)