Artificial Intelligence and Robotics blog
Awesome-o
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Posts by Awesome-o
Keeping a ball balanced in real-time using a touch screen
Sep 7th
The researchers at the Real-Time Systems Laboratory (RETIS lab) of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa have created a nice system that manages to keep a steel ball balanced in the middle of a touch screen. The system consists of a Flex board with a Microchip dsPIC DSC and a couple of servo motors other than the touch screen, of course. I don’t know much about electronics but I know that real-time control is hard. The video below shows the ball and plate system in action. Very cool!
ScanRobot: An innovative book scanning robot
Sep 6th
There is no doubt that today there is a huge interest in digitizing large collections of books many of which were written well before digital computers were an important tool for authors. But digitizing a book is a difficult task. This is a job well suited for a robot. Treventus Mechatronics has a very nice solution to the book scanning problem with their ScanRobot offering. This innovative robot can scan any book at a rate of 2400 pages per hour. The ScanRobot uses patented technology to scan and turn pages easily and naturally without damaging the book. The video below shows the automatic book scanner ScanRobot in action.
Estimating surface depth from two digital images taken from the same viewpoint
Aug 28th
New Scientist reports on new computer vision research that allows the learning of surface structure using two digital images taken from the same viewpoint but under different illumination. More specifically, one photo is taken with flash and another using only ambient light. The differences between the two images allowed researchers from the University of Manchester in the UK and Dolby Canada to extract albedo and depth information for the surface; such information is then used to render the surface from different viewpoints properly illuminated. Under the title of “surface depth hallucination,” the researchers presented their work at the recently held, well known and very prestigious SIGGRAPH conference.
The project’s web site describes the method as follows.
Surface depth hallucination offers a simple fast way to acquire albedo and depth for textured surfaces that exhibit mostly Lambertian reflectance. We obtain depth estimates entirely in image space, and from a single view so there are no complications that arise from registering texture with the depth obtained. (source)
The following video from New Scientist explains the surface depth hallucination method in more detail and it includes examples of estimated surface models.
The Toyota Winglet
Aug 26th
About a month ago Toyota Motor revealed a new stand-up scooter (called the Winglet) that it was creating. Since the announcement there has been plenty of buzz around the internet and now the Winglet is seen as competition for the Segway in the personal transport market.
The Winglet consists of two wheels, an electric motor, a body, and internal sensors that monitor the rider’s position. The sensors are able to detect stability issues and quickly resolve them by making power adjustments, hence keeping the Winglet (and the rider) from falling. The technology is quite advanced, but like the Segway, the market isn’t very big for it at the moment. Perhaps Toyota and Dean Kaman (developer of the Segway) are ahead of our time and one day their creations will be widely used.
Even if the personal transport business never kicks off, it is still amusing to look at the way these things work. The Winglet constantly detects the speed and position of itself in order to keep the rider standing. It can go up to 3.7 mph, which is slow in comparison to the Segway (which hits 12.5 mph), but is still nice for casual movement.
Toyota has created the transport in several sizes to accommodate people of different sizes. The height of the Winglet can range from 18 inches all the way to almost four feet tall. The handlebars can also be adjusted. The width and length is standard in all sizes at 18 and 10 inches respectably.
The presentation only displayed prototypes of the creation, but Toyota will be developing more soon. The company plans to start testing the Winglets this fall in Japan and they will move forward from there.
Tongue computing technology may help disabled
Aug 25th
Researchers at Georgia Tech believe that the mouth can essentially be turned into a computer via a tiny magnetic system placed on the tongue. The tongue would be the controller and a user would touch different teeth to tell the system what to do. Different sensors on the cheeks send the information to a head unit that calculates the signal and performs the requested task. The technology has drawn a lot of interest because it would be very useful for many disabled people.
The Tongue Drive System would allow handicapped users to move around their wheelchairs, control computers or other electronic devices, and manage home appliances with simple movements of the tongue. Mike Jones, vice president of research and technology at the Shepard Center in Atlanta, said that the device would give almost a limitless number of “switches” to do different things.
It is the huge number of controls that really makes this technology intriguing. There are currently several other devices that allow the disabled to control thing with their face and mouth, but this is the first that allows so many options with such a simple approach. Currently, the most-used systems of this type only have a few commands, which really don’t allow the user to do many things. There are also systems that have hundreds of different controlling options, but at the moment those are very complex and often difficult to use and set up. The Tongue Drive System brings together the best of both worlds with its simplicity and maneuverability.
British Army urban reconnaissance contest
Aug 21st
Last week the British Army held a contest in an effort to spark the development of new technology for urban reconnaissance. The event had a great turnout with devices and gizmos of all sorts being presented including various types of robots, flying saucers, and remote-controlled buggies. Some of the entries were very intricate and advanced, while others weren’t.
The winners were announced on Tuesday and Stellar Research Services from Southampton came out on top. Their creation was a combination of a flying robotic aircraft, ground drone and a tracked vehicle. Reporters have compared the robot to WALL-E, Pixar’s robot character, due to similarities in appearance.
Stellar’s creation, called Saturn, scored the most points in the complex obstacle course set up by the contest holders. The robot had to explore a mock village while looking out for and detecting threats such as hidden snipers, armed enemies in the open and roadside bombs. Saturn was the best of the competing robots at identifying and locating the targets, hence getting the team the most points. The three-in-one robot used a wide array of sensors, cameras, and radar in searching for the “threats.”
Team Leader Julia Richardson was extremely pleased after her team won, adding that they had worked long and hard to make it happen. Several other teams were also handed accolades for unique and inspiring designs. The army got a good turnout and is likely to begin adapting some of the ideas from the contest into actual utilities for use in the battlefield.
UK company develops snake-arm robot
Aug 18th
England-based OC Robotics has created a snake-arm robot which is very flexible and also fully controllable. The United States Department of Defense (DOD) will be testing the device in small and unusual areas in order to see if it will be of use to them. The creators claim that it can be controlled very precisely and could prove to be very useful for investigations.
The snake-arm is 24 inches long and consists of a “backbone” which is broken into segments by little wires. This allows a user to control each of the wired segments via joystick, meaning it can be bent in several locations so that it can be twisted to fit where ever it is needed. The wires are also able to shift in length as a motor pulls on them to control each wires’ length individually. The software is able to take the desired shape and configure each wire to the right length in order to fit it.
The company believes that the invention will be useful in a wide array of fields including aerospace assembly, nuclear inspection, and even certain types of surgery. The technology is very easily manipulated which allows people to use the arms in a variety of ways. The company even claims that it can be used as a steerable hose pipe or vacuum cleaner, although the price will probably be too high for people to buy it for their households. Currently only the 24-inch arm pictured to the right has been shown, but the company says they are currently working on arms of different lengths.
The AI Landscape poster celebrates 50 years of Artificial Intelligence research and development
Aug 17th
(Click on the image for a high resolution version.)
The AI Magazine’s summer edition published by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is celebrating half a century of Artificial Intelligence research and development. Today, it is far more common to hear people talk about the failures of AI and all the promises it never fulfilled rather than hear about the successes of AI and how important its integration into our everyday life is going to be. The magazine hopes to promote AI by publishing the AI Landscape poster shown in the image at the beginning of this post.
It is true that we are far from having strong AI some time soon and that very little research today is undertaken with the goal of producing such a system. Most academic research is focused on a very narrow area within AI often producing small improvements over current methods of solving very specific problems. As a result, even though a general purpose AI is not available neither commercially or academically, some of the smaller problems solved in the last 50 years are quickly finding their way into everyday life. The AI Magazine’s AI Landscape poster is an effort to showcase how AI research has advanced over the last 50 years and how it will become an important element in daily life in the not so distant future.
As you can see from the poster image at the beginning of this post, AI is making inroads in a number of human affairs such as education (robots for education, smart desks, tutoring systems, and efficient Internet search engines) and medicine (expert systems for diagnosis, smart wheelchairs, assistive systems for people with dementia, drug design and robotic surgery.) Researchers have also made huge leaps forward in term of designing robotic bodies similar to our own (consider for example the proliferation of humanoid robots in the last 5 years compared to the previous years when only Honda could afford to develop such a complex machine.) Some commercial robots have also emerged and have quickly become popular (an example is, of course, the very popular vacuum cleaning robot Roomba from iRobot and several museum tour guides that are making appearances in museum around Europe and North America since the late 90s.) Let us also not forget the scientific research taking place outside the confines of our pale blue dot allowed to us because of the creation of intelligent robots such as NASA’s Mars Rovers and other interplanetary spacecraft.
Exoskeletons (see the Sarcos exoskeleton for example) are not mentioned but I think they should have been for no other reason but the immense potential of such machines to help differently enabled people.
Other areas of great advancement include hand written recognition, spam filtering (email would have been rendered useless as a medium of communication if it was not for AI,) fraud detection, vehicle navigation, and smart homes (not many of these around today but I bet in another 10 years more of us will be able to afford a large variety of automation systems in our homes.)
The goal of AAAI’s poster is to spread awareness among the people about how AI systems have advanced over the last few decades and even prepare us for more applications that are sure to follow in the future. Help AAAI spread the word by discussing the poster. Together, we can eliminate misinformation about the true achievements of Artificial Intelligence and encourage more people to study but most importantly accept AI in their daily lives.
The AI Landscape poster is copyright AAAI; get the poster in full resolution here.
Improving video quality using high resolution digital photographs
Aug 15th
Researchers at the University of Washington have devised a new algorithm for enhancing and editing video. Given a low resolution video of a scene, the algorithm takes advantage of high resolution digital photographs of the same scene in order to improve the quality of the original video. Some of the enhancements include improving the resolution of the video, dealing with lighting artifacts such as specular reflections, improving the video camera’s dynamic range, and removing camera shake. Also, the algorithm allows users to seamlessly remove unwanted objects from the video and even edit the texture and color of select objects using a small number of actions, i.e., by only editing a few frames from the original video.
Given a video and a set of high resolution digital photographs, the team uses structure-from-motion and multiple-view-geometry methods to estimate a 3D representation of the scene. Using texture information, the team can estimate the location of the still photographs in the video and then blend them in the video correctly using the structure information and an image-based rendering algorithm. Currently, the method only works with video of static scenes.
The video below, explains the method and shows multiple examples of it used to enhance and edit several poor quality videos. I especially like the removal of objects such as the stop sign in front of the flower shop and the editing of individual objects such as the frames of the photographs in the last example.
In case you are wondering, this method is not real-time. In fact, it requires roughly 5 minutes of processing time per video frame of 853 x 480 resolution. Fortunately, this method is mostly automatic requiring very little interaction from a user. The researchers also suggest that the processing time can be significantly reduced if certain parts of the algorithm are optimized more carefully. There is more information about this video editing method at the project’s research web page which includes a link to the published scientific paper.
New Mars rover revealed
Aug 15th
UK based space company, Astrium has unveiled two new prototypes for future Mars rovers. The two creations are regarded as the most robust and maneuverable rovers built to date and are scheduled to be complete and sent to Mars by 2015.
Chris Draper, Astrium’s ExoMars rover vehicle industrial manager, has said that the six-wheeled rovers can literally go where no rovers have gone before due to how easily they can adapt to different situations. Draper was very enthusiastic and confident about the release of the robots, claiming that they wil even be able to outperform the applauded American MER rovers, which outlasted theri expected lifetimes.
Astrium’s rovers have six wheel steering, meaning that they can turn in more directions faster. They are also equipped with wheel walking capabilities, meaning that on uneven surfaces they can essentially anchor down with five of the wheels while slowly moving forward with the sixth. From the prototypes it looks like Astrium may be able to pull this off because the traveling and navigation software is quite impressive. In fact, the navigation system is powerful enough that the rovers can control themselves and explore without much human intervention.
The rovers will also have more scientific tools than any other rover currently built. This will mean more information can be gathered and since the rovers are expected to last a long time that could lead to big revelations about the Red Planet.
Although the final product is still several years down the road, the company seems optimistic with its technology and what it can do. The only obstacle that may remain is with funding, but if their prototypes are really that reliable, it shouldn’t be long before an investor helps the company out.
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