Artificial Intelligence and Robotics blog
Robotics
WABIAN-2R: Walk this way!
Sep 28th
It is no secret that modern humanoid robots such as ASIMO and QRIO don’t walk in the most attractive or human-like fashion. The second generation WABIAN-2R humanoid from Japan’s Waseda University wants to change this with its more natural walking gate.
Standing tall at 150cm and weighing 60Kgr, Wabian-2R boasts a new swiveling pelvis and the ability to walk taking heel-to-toe strides extending its leg much like humans do. This new design allows for a much more natural looking walking motion as you can tell from this video.
Wabian is brought to us from the same people at Waseda’s department of mechanical engineering who also designed the WF-4RII anthropomorphic flute playing robot, the WT-5 anthropomorphic talking robot, the WE-4RII emotion expressing humanoid robot and many others.
One of Wabian’s weak points is its immense power consumption that only allows it to remain operational for 15 minutes when it is not attached to an external power source. In addition, it appears that achieving the more natural walking gate comes at a high price since Wabian is not able to negotiate even the smallest of obstacles in its path. This video shows how Wabian loses its balance when confronted with a doormat. So, if you hope that Wabian will be fetching your beer in the near future then I suggest that you don’t keep your fridge more than 15 minutes away and keep your doormat out of the robot’s path.
RoboCup: When and why did robots start playing soccer?
Sep 2nd
RoboCup is one of the most well known annual robotics competitions. It started in 1997 and it has since grown steadily every year to include competition at many different levels including in recent years humanoid robots. Of course, there is also the simulation soccer league. But did the first robots play soccer in 1997 and why are researchers interested in soccer playing robots?
What most people don’t know is that robots did not play soccer for the first time in 1997 but rather in 1993. The computational intelligence group at the University of British Columbia (UBC) was busy in the early nineties developing robot hardware and software including control architectures and algorithms. The Dynamo project was about programming remote controlled toy cars to play soccer. All the processing was done on workstations and not on-board the robots. An overhead camera tracked the robots’ and ball’s positions and a workstation using constraint-based programming controlled the cars. The toy cars were known as the Dynamites and are historically the first soccer playing robots.
Dr. Alan Mackworth was the lead for this project. He is still at UBC and a member of the Laboratory for Computational Intelligence, a lab that he helped grow to one of the most important AI hubs in North America. In addition, he is currently president elect of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). In 1994, he co-authored with one of his students, M. Sahota, a paper suggesting that soccer is the perfect domain for testing multi-agent theories and moving away from the Good Old Fashioned AI and Robotics (GOFAIR) model. In the paper, they make a very compelling argument for robot soccer which of course led to the event that is well known today with the first tournament taking place three years later in Nagoya, Japan.
You can read a bit about the history of the Dynamo project here and you can find Dr. Mackworth’s paper here. The latter is not a mathematical paper so it is easily readable even for people without a PhD in Computer Science.
South Korean robot Hubo is living the dream
Aug 21st
The South Korean state of the art humanoid robot Hubo has been recruited by rapper Kanye West to star in one of his upcoming music videos. The Hubo humanoid robot was developed by professor Oh Jun-ho at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science (KAIST.) Hubo stands 124cm tall and weighs about 55Kg. It can also move at a speed of 3 Km/h. Hubo is capable of moving each of its fingers independently, dance, shake hands with people and play games with children. Hubo is often seen as South Korea’s answer to Japan’s advanced humanoid robots, ASIMO and QRIO.
Hubo was introduced in January of 2005 and it became famous just last November during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum when its creators installed a mask on Hubo’s head to make it look like Albert Einstein. Einstein-Hubo was also photographed shaking hands with USA president G. Bush.
Now Hubo will become a TV star since the Korean team accepted an invitation by Getting Out Our Dreams Pictures to have the robot star in a music video with Kanye West.
“Getting Out Our Dreams Pictures, a New York-based production company of Kanye West, contacted us to use Hubo in its music video and I opted to accept the proposal,” Oh said.
“Hubo will appear in a music video for a fantasy song on the debut album of Sara, a male trio backed by Kanye West,” Linss told the Times.
I wish Hubo the best of luck in his new music career!
The da Vinci Surgical System
Aug 19th
Robots are everywhere these days helping us to vacuum our house’s floor, cut our lawn, inspect oil pipelines and even fight terrorism. There is however an even more important application for these marvels of technology and that is medical robotics. Don’t be surprised if the next time you need surgery your doctor is assisted by a medical robot in the Operating Room. One such robot is the da Vinci Surgical System that is becoming increasingly popular in many ORs and it is often used for prostate cancer surgery.
Intuitive Surgical from Sunnyvale, California, are the makers of the robot that sells for a bit over 1 million US dollars. They claim to have sold more than 300 robots to hospitals and academia.
“The da Vinci Surgical System consists of an ergonomically designed surgeon’s console, a patient-side cart with four interactive robotic arms, the high-performance InSite® Vision System and proprietary EndoWrist® Instruments. Powered by state-of-the-art robotic technology, the surgeon’s hand movements are scaled, filtered and seamlessly translated into precise movements of the EndoWrist Instruments. The net result: an intuitive interface with breakthrough surgical capabilities.”
It is obvious that this robot does not actually make any decisions and it definitely does not perform the surgery on its own. It is just a very complex tool that allows a surgeon to perform the surgery in a minimally invasive way. The end result is less pain and a faster recovery for the patient.
French household humanoid robots to take over the world
Jul 20th
A small French startup, Aldebaran Robotics, announced today their consumer oriented humanoid robot platform Nao. They say it will be available for sale in just a few months in early 2007. The robot is 23 inches tall and initially it will be an entertainment product although Aldebaran Robotics hopes that eventually it will be able to help you with household chores.
This is what they say Nao will initially be able to do, “Our robot, designed at entertainment ends, will be able to interact with its owner, and will evolve in terms of behaviors and functionalities. This one will be able to teach the robot new behaviors, from a computer, through Wi-Fi. The possible behaviors are only limited by your imagination!”
As a product it looks like an AIBO with two legs. I just hope it will be more responsive than the AIBO. They haven’t posted any details about Nao’s hardware but I am willing to bet that it will require an desktop computer to do most of the Artificial Intelligence.
On the plus side, the robot will run Linux. Another win for the Open Source movement.
Visit Aldebaran Robotics
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