Controlled by Underwater Tablets Show Off their Swimming Skills
The New Scientisthas some great new video of our flippered friends.
The Aqua robots can be used in hard-to-reach spots like coral reefs, shipwrecks or caves.
Though the diver remains at at a safe distance, he can see everything the robot sees. Check out this robot’s-eye-view of a swimming pool.
Aqua robots are controlled by tablet computers encased in a waterproof shell. Motion sensors can tell how the waterproofed computer is tilted, and the robot moves in the same direction, New Scientist reports.
As we wrote earlier this summer, tablet-controlled robots working in concert with human divers would be much easier to command than undersea robots controlled from a ship. Plus, they just look so cute.
Proving that robots really do have a place at the pub-time to change your archaic anti-droid policies, Mos Eisley Cantina the team over at Willow Garage has programmed one of its PR2 robots to play a pretty impressive game of pool.
More impressively, they did it in just under one week.
In order to get the PR2 to make pool shark worthy shots, the team had to figure out how to make it recognize both the table and the balls, things that come easily to all but the thirstiest pool hall patrons.
PR2 used its high-res camera to locate and track balls and to orient itself to the table via the diamond markers on the rails.
It further oriented itself by identifying the table legs with its lower laser sensor.
Once the bot learned how to spatially identify the balls and the table, the team simply employed an open-source pool physics program to let the PR2 plan and execute its shots.
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.
Following in the footsteps of many robots we’ve seen who perform awesome but random feats, Japanese electronics company Murata has revealed an update of their Little Seiko humanoid robot for 2010.
Murata Girl, like she is known, is 50 centimeters tall weighs six kilograms and can unicycle backwards and forwards. Whereas in her previous iteration, she could only ride across a straight balance beam, she is now capable of navigating an S-curve as thin as 2.5 centimeters only one centimeter wider than the tire of her unicycle .
The secret is a balancing mechanism that calculates the degree she needs to turn at to safely maneuver around the curves. She also makes use of a perhaps more rudimentary, but nonetheless effective, balancing mechanism and holds her arms stretched out to her sides,Nastia Liukin-style. Murata Girl is battery-powered, outfitted with a camera, and controllable via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.
Also, because we know you were wondering, she’s a Virgo and her favorite pastime is (naturally) practicing riding her unicycle at the park.
By using a learning algorithm, Italian researchers taught a child-like humanoid robot archery, even outfitting it with a spectacular headdress to celebrate its new ski .
Petar Kormushev, Sylvain Calinon and Ryo Saegusa of the Italian Institute of Technology developed an algorithm called “Archer,” for Augmented Reward Chained Regression.
The iCub robot is taught how to hold the bow and arrow, but then learns by itself how to aim and shoot the arrow so it hits the center of a target. Watch it learn below.
The researchers say this type of learning algorithm would be preferable to even their own reinforcement learning techniques, which require more input from humans.
The team used an iCub, a small humanoid robot designed to look like a 3 year old child. It was developed by a consortium of European universities with the goal of mimicking and understanding cognition, according to Technology Review.
It has several physical and visual sensors, and “Archer” takes advantage of them to provide more feedback than other learning algorithms, the researchers say.
The team will present their findings with the archery learning algorithm at the Humanoids 2010 conference in December.
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 Guides make life easier for the directionally challenged
Robot Guides Robot guides help visitors navigate a banking center in Madrid. Y Dreams
In an innovative solution to the problem of crowd control in a business complex filled with 5,500 employees, a banking center in Madrid has assembled a team of stylish helpful robots to help people navigate.
According to the robots' designers, the helmet-shaped Santander Interactive Guest Assistants (SIGA) are the first machines to use swarm robotics in a commercial context as opposed to say in submarine exploration or flying art.
After meeting the robots, guests choose their language and destination on the console's touchscreen. The robotic butlers then take them anywhere, from the meeting room, to the auditorium, to the exit toward a bus stop.
It`s can Cry, Throw Tantrums, and Talk to Each Other
It`s can act out phone users' feelings
Canadian researchers trying to integrate robots into our lives have come up with a pair of dancing, crying cell phone 'bots. The robots, called Callo and Cally, are cell phones with limbs.
Cally stands about 7 inches high and walks, dances and mimics human behavior. Callo stands about 9 inches tall, and his face, which is a cell phone display screen, shows human facial expressions when he receives text-messaged emotions. When he receives a smile emoticon, Callo stands on one leg, waves his arms and smiles. If he receives a frown, his shoulders slump and he will cry. If he gets an urgent message, or a really sad one, he'll wave his arms frantically.
Ji-Dong Yim is a PhD student in interactive arts and technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, says it's basically a simple avatar system.
The robots can communicate with each other, for instance when their masters are on a video call.
When you move your robot, my robot will move the same, and vice versa, so that we can share emotional feelings using (physically smart) robot phones, he says in an SFU release.
The robots, which are made from Nokia N82 phone parts and components from a Bioloid robot kit, can detect human faces using OpenCV software.
Cally can even track users' facial expressions during a phone call.
Robot can also be preprogrammed to move in certain ways when receiving calls from specific phone numbers.
The same concepts could be used to make other helper robots communicate with people and build long-term intimacy with them, researchers say.
Friendly Robot Companion:AIDA reacts to the driver's facial expressions and other cues, responding in the proper social context. MIT
With all the sensors, computerized gadgetry and even Internet connectivity being built into cars these days, it's a wonder our automobiles aren't more like Optimus Prime. Our cars will now email us when they need to have their oil changed, and recognize our facial expressions to determine whether we're enjoying ourselves, but for all the information available to us when we're driving, it's often not possible to organize it all in real-time and package it in a way that we can digest while behind the wheel. Researchers at MIT and Audi created the Affective Intelligent Driving Agent to address exactly that problem.
AIDA communicates with the driver via a small, sociable robot built into the dashboard.
The idea is to develop an informed and friendly passenger, the buddy perpetually riding shotgun who aside from reading the map and helping with navigation, acts as a companion. As such, AIDA is being developed to read drivers' moods via their facial expressions and other cues (hand gestures?) and respond to them in the proper social context. It communicates back in very human ways as well: with a smile, the blink of an eye, the drooping of its head.
Prompting memories of KIT from the (most excellent) television series Knight Rider, the idea is for AIDA to have personality and establish a relationship with the driver in which both parties learn from each another and help each other out. AIDA analyzes the driver's mobility patterns, common routes and destinations, and driving habits. It then merges its knowledge of the driver with its knowledge of the city around it, mashing up the drivers priorities and needs with real-time information on everything from tourist attractions to environmental conditions to commercial activity to help the driver make better decisions.
If, for instance, there's a parade route between you and the grocery store, AIDA will tell you about it and help you find your way around it. Or it might simply remind you that your gas tank is low, knowing that given the time of day you must be on your way to work several miles away. AIDA will even give you feedback on your driving, helping you increase your fuel efficiency or suggesting that your policy of making rolling illegal lefts through stop signs while in school zones may be ill-advised.
Unlike the sci-fi cars of our childhood fancy-KIT, the Batmobile, Herbie -- AIDA is still a ways from pulling off daring rescue maneuvers or other heroic acts of derring-do. But it can make the road a safer, more informed place, and if the MIT robotics researchers have their way, one that's not quite so lonely.
