However they are assisting the elderly, or simply popping human skulls like ripe fruit, robots aren't usually known for their light touch. And while this may be fine as long as they stay relegated to cleaning floors and assembling cars, as robots perform more tasks that put them in contact with human flesh, be it surgery or helping the blind, their touch sensitivity becomes increasingly important.
Unlike the mechanical sensors currently used to regulate robotic touching, the Belgian researchers used optical sensors to measure the feedback. Under the robot skin, they created a web of optical beams. Even the faintest break in those beams registers in the robot's computer brain, making the skin far more sensitive than mechanical sensors, which are prone to interfering with each other.
Robots like the da Vinci surgery station already register feedback from touch, but a coating of this optical sensor-laden skin could vastly enhance the sensitivity of the machine. Additionally, a range of Japanese robots designed to help the elderly could gain a lighter touch with their sensitive charges if equipped with the skin.
Really, any interaction between human flesh and robot surfaces could benefit from the more lifelike touch provided by this sensor array. And to answer the question you're all thinking but won't say: yes. But please, get your mind out of the gutter. This is a family site.
In the Japan’s newest RoboCop-looking humanoid robot practices yoga, tracks faces and objects and, in what seems to be a robo-requirement these days, pours drinks.
The industrial HRP-4 robot was designed to coexist with people, and its thin athlete frame is meant to be more appealing, according to Kawada Industries, which built the robot with Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.
5 foot tall and 86 pound robot is a deliberately downsized version of its larger sibling, the HRP-2.
Kawada first developed HRP-2 seven years ago, and wanted to design an updated version, according to a press release.
HRP-4 has 34 degrees of freedom and can move its arm seven ways. It can carry about a pound in each arm. All joint motors are less than 80 watts,as CNET reports.
With a small laptop can be installed in HRP-4’s back to increase its data processing capabilities.
As a general rule, when NASA flies a scientific mission all the way to Mars, we expect that mission to last for a while.
For instance, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers were slated to run for three months and are still operating 6 years later. But one NASA engineer wants to send a mission all the way to the Red Planet that would last just two hours once deployed: a rocket-powered, robotic airplane that screams over the Martian landscape at more than 450 miles per hour.
ARES (Aerial Regional-Scale Environmental Surveyor) has been on the back burner for a while now, and while it's not the first Mars plane dreamed up by NASA it is the first one that very well might see some flight time over the Martian frontier.
Flying at about a mile above the surface, it would sample the environment over a large swath of area and collect measurements over rough, mountainous parts of the Martian landscape that are inaccessible by ground-based rovers and also hard to observe from orbiters.
The Mars plane would most likely make its flight over the southern hemisphere, where regions of high magnetism in the crust and mountainous terrain have presented scientists with a lot of mystery and not much data.
Enveloped in an aeroshell similar to the ones that deployed the rovers, ARES would detach from a carrier craft about 12 hours from the Martian surface. At about 20 miles up, the aeroshell would open, ARES would extend its folded wings and tail, and the rockets would fire. It sounds somewhat complicated, but compared with actually landing package full of sensitive scientific instruments on the surface deploying ARES is relatively simple.
The flight would only last for two hours, but during that short time ARES would cover more than 932 miles of previously unexplored territory, taking atmospheric measurements, looking for signs of water, collecting chemical sensing data, and studying crustal magnetism. Understanding the magnetic field in this region will tell researchers whether the magnetic fields there might shield the region of high-energy solar winds, which in turn has huge implications for future manned missions there.
The NASA team already has a half-scale prototype of ARES that has successfully performed deployment drills and wind tunnel tests that prove it will fly through the Martian atmosphere.
The team is now preparing the tech for the next NASA Mars mission solicitation and expects to see it tearing through Martian skies by the end of the decade.
Frosted Flakes come in a rectangular prism with colorful decorations, but so does your childhood copy ofChicken Little.
Do you need to teach the AI to read before it can give you breakfast?
Maybe no ! A team of European researchers has built a robot called ARMAR-III, which tries to learn not just from previously stored instructions or massive processing power but also from reaching out and touching things. Consider the cereal box By picking it up, the robot could learn that the cereal box weighs less than a similarly sized book, and if it flips the box over, cereal comes out.
Together with guidance and maybe a little scolding from a human coach, the robot . the result of thePACO-PLUSresearch project can build general representations of objects and the actions that can be applied to them.
[ The robot ] builds object representations through manipulation," explains Tamim Asfour of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, in Germany, who worked on the hardware side of the system .
The robot’s thinking is not separated from its body, because it must use its body to learn how to think. The idea, sometimes called embodied cognition, has a long history in the cognitive sciences, says psychologist Art Glenberg at Arizona State University in Tempe, who is not involved in the project.
All sorts of our thinking are in terms of how we can act in the world, which is determined jointly by characteristics of the world and our bodies.
Embodied cognition also requires sophisticated two-way communication between a robot’s lower-level sensors such as its hands and camera eyes and its higher-level planning processor.
The hope is that an embodied-cognition robot would be able to solve other sorts of problems unanticipated by the programmer, Glenberg says .
If ARMAR-III doesn’t know how to do something, it will build up a library of new ways to look at things or move things until its higher-level processor can connect the new dots.
The PACO-PLUS system’s masters tested it in a laboratory kitchen. After some rudimentary fumbling, the robot learned to complete tasks such as searching for, identifying, and retrieving a stray box of cereal in an unexpected location in the kitchen or ordering cups by color on a table.
It sounds trivial, but it isn’t," says team member Bernhard Hommel, a psychologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. "He has to know what you’re talking about, where to look for it in the kitchen, even if it’s been moved, and then grasp it and return to you.
When trainers placed a cup in the robot’s way after asking it to set the table, it worked out how to move the cup out of the way before continuing the task. The robot wouldn’t have known to do that if it hadn’t already figured out what a cup is and that it’s movable and would get knocked down if left in place. These are all things the robot learned by moving its body around and exploring the scenery with its eyes.
ARMAR-III’s capabilities can be broken down into three categories: creating representations of objects and actions, understanding verbal instructions, and figuring out how to execute those instructions.
However, having the robot go through trial-and-error ways to figure out all three would just take too long. We weren’t successful in showing the complete cycle, Asfour says of the four year long project, which ended last summer.
Instead, they’d provide one of the three components and let the robot figure out the rest. The team ran experiments in which they gave the robot hints, sometimes by programming and sometimes by having human trainers demonstrate something.
For example, they would tell it, This is a green cup, instead of expecting the robot to take the time to learn the millions of shades of green.
Once it had the perception given to it, the robot could then proceed with figuring out what the user wanted it to do with the cup and planning the actions involved.
The key was the system’s ability to form representations of objects that worked at the sensory level and combine that with planning and verbal communications.
That’s our major achievement from a scientific point of view, Asfour says.
ARMAR-III may represent a new breed of robots that don’t try to anticipate every possible environmental input,
instead seeking out stimuli using their bodies to create a joint mental and physical map of the system .
possibilities Rolf Pfeifer of the University of Zurich, who was not involved in the project, says, "One of the basic insights of embodiment is that we generate environmental stimulation. We don’t just sit there like a computer waiting for stimulation.
This type of thinking mimics other insights from psychology, such as the idea that humans perceive their environment in terms that depend on their physical ability to interact with it. In short, a hill looks steeper when you’re tired. One study in 2008 found that when alone, people perceive hills as being less steep than they do when accompanied by a friend.
ARMAR-III’s progeny may even offer insights into how embodied cognition works in humans, Glenberg adds. "Robots offer a marvelous way of trying to test this sort of thinking.
Robot is Reeti, who's apparently what you get when a robot and a media center PC have offspring. Reeti is designed to provide an interface between your TV and your computer, offering a variety of additional capabilities
Setting practical uses aside, Reeti is very emotionally expressive, considering its relative simplicity. It has cheeks that glow to communicate mood, and there are touch sensors in its face to enable it to react when you prod it. Each of Reeti's eyes has its own HD camera, and its 3D perceptual view lets it recognize people and objects and track motion. Reeti can understand (and localize) spoken commands, and its speech synthesis allows it to read emails and RSS feeds to you. Oh hey, something it can do!
why I'd want a Reeti in my house, because it's a robot and it's expressive and funny looking, but at this point I'm not quite sure what Reeti plans to do for me that I couldn't do more efficiently with a mouse and keyboard, you know?
It looks like Reeti is designed to be more of an open platform where people can write their own apps to extend the capabilities of the robot which is fine but if you look at what makes an app store successful
They're mostly targeted towards devices with enoughinherentcapability that you can establish a large, happy consumer base without any apps at all, creating your own market. So that goes back to my original question: what can Reetidofor me?
Setting practical uses aside (for the second time), I do appreciate Reeti's overall aesthetic, if you can call it that. Reeti is likely as strange looking as it is, in order to distance itself from any sort of anthropomorphic impressions. It's got eyes and a mouth to help it communicate, but it's so far from looking human that we don't get caught up in how it doesn't look human, if that makes sense
Reeti is made by the French company Robopec, and apparently there will be some way of pre-ordering one at some point for about $7,000 (!). Until we get a little more information on all of the spectacular and amazing things that Reeti may or may not be able to do, though, I'd hold off adopting one of these little guys, unless you're so smitten that it's already too late.
This robot head, which is supposed to represent a 1 to 2year-old child, is meant to help researchers study caregiver-child interactions. It is not meant to make you run screaming from a room.
Hisashi Ishihara, Yuichiro Yoshikawa, and Prof. Minoru Asada of Osaka University in Japan have been working on robots to study cognitive development. They say it’s hard for humans to interact with robots in a natural way, so they wanted to create a robot that can mimic the facial expressions of a real kid.
Asada’s team came up with Affetto, which can produce a wide range of facial expressions by moving actuators in its face. It can look inquisitive, happy, surprised, upset and more, by tilting its eyebrows, moving its jaw, panning its eyes and tilting its head. Its eyeballs are equipped with cameras and it has microphones and tactile sensors embedded in its silicone skin, lending it a pretty realistic appearance.
Affetto is part of a project to develop a full-bodied robot that's as similar to a human being as possible,reports IEEE.
But in-home helper bots, which are the main goal of many robotics research projects, are anything but widespread, even in that robo-friendly country. Apparently old people and sick people, even in Japan, still prefer that human touch.
Rather than humanoid robots that do favors like pick up juice boxes, and even be-limbed ‘bots that wash people’s hair, some roboticists are increasing their focus on machines like self-adjusting beds that turn into wheelchairs, as this BBC story reports.
Especially in Japan, efforts to build lifelike, useful humanoid robots often center on care for the elderly. Japan is an aging country, and it admits very few immigrants who could work as nursing home attendants or in-home care providers. But so far, the robots can’t do enough to be very useful, robot companies and analysts tell the BBC.
Cute, pet-like robot companions have sold modestly well, the BBC notes — more than 1,000 Paro baby seal 'bots are in Japanese nursing homes and hospitals, as well as private homes. This is not a staggering figure, but that could be because of its $2,800 price tag.
Joseph Engelberger, 85, who invented the first industrial robot in the 1950s, said robots ought to be more common. Every year, 200,000 elderly Americans fall and break a leg, and robots could help prevent that, he tells the BBC: “Robots should cost the same as a Mercedes and could be rented out. That would be a bargain compared to paying $600 a week for help.”
After years of spending billions of yen on humanoid robot research, the Japanese government is increasingly focused on simpler, more practical robot platforms that can perform simple tasks. The five-year Home-use Robot Practical Application Project, started in 2009, seeks a bot that can be used as both a wheelchair and bed; a cleaning robot; a security robot; a wearable robot suit that assists daily activities; and a two-wheeled rideable robot, according to Tech-On.
These single-minded ‘bots might be more palatable to elderly people and patients, the BBC says — already, some hospital robots have been abandoned because patients didn’t like them. A $100,000 hospital model “put patients off,” the BBC says: “We want humans caring for us, not machines,” one patient said.
DARwIn-OP America’s newest humanoid robot, unveiled this week at IEEE’s Humanoids 2010 conference.
It`s 18 inches tall, weighs 6 pounds and is ready to be messed with. It’s OK, he’s an open-source bot.
Designed by Dennis Hong’s RoMeLa team at Virginia Tech with collaborators at University of Pennsylvania's Grasp Lab, Purdue University, and Korean company Robotis, DARwIn-OP’s hardware and software are open-source — you can fabricate the parts, choose your own electronics and build one of your own. And why wouldn’t you? There’s something so cute about his Astroboy fins .
About 10 DARwIn-OP units were making the rounds at IEEE this week, and afterward will be distributed to the partner universities.
If you don’t work in a robotics lab and don’t have access to a CAD system, Robotis will build one for you, to the tune of $12,000 ($9,600 with an educational discount).
