IHT Article Print Page ‘Sociable’ robots react to the surrounding world

NYT

Cynthia Breazeal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is famous for her robots, not just because they are programmed to perform specific tasks, but because they seem to have emotional as well as physical reactions to the world around them. They are “embodied,” she says, even “sociable” robots. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York is exhibiting a “cyberfloral installation” by Breazeal, which features robotic flowers that sway when a human hand is near and glow in bright colors. Breazeal wrote “Designing Sociable Robots,” released this year by MIT Press. Claudia Dreifus spoke with her for The New York Times.

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RobotsLife.com – Tadahiro Kawada

[old but interesting interview] Tadahiro KAWADA, Director, Kawada Industries – Aircraft and Mechanical Systems Division

Kawada Industries is the company that built the HRP-2P (HRP-2-prototype, showed left and below).

This robot, presented for the first time at the end of March 2002, is an anthropomorphic, biped machine. It has been developed for the Humanoid Robotics Project (HRP), sponsored by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), part of the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry.

Kawada Industries was in charge of the hardware design and fabrication, while two other companies, Yaskawa Electric Corp. and Shimizu Corp., were responsible of the other aspects of the project.

HRP-2P is taller (1,54 m) but lighter (58 kg) than Honda’s Asimo. It has 30 degrees of freedom and will be used for experiments later this year including “walking on uneven terrains, falling or tipping-over, or getting-up from fallen positions”.

Tadahiro Kawada is Director at Kawada Industries’ Aircraft and Mechanical Systems Division, which was in charge of HRP-2P.

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Silicon.com – Robots – the more human the better, study finds

“Sometimes people are afraid of robots,” says researcher. Funny that.

Imitation is not just the best form of flattery – it’s also good interface design. A study shows that talking computers that copy a user’s unique vocal inflections seem easier to use.

The researchers think that a key component of machine likeability is the ability to mirror the ‘music’ – the rhythm and pitch – of a user’s speech.

This finding stemmed from an experiment conducted by Japanese researcher Noriko Suzuki’s team at ATR Media Information Science Laboratories in Kyoto, reported scientific journal New Scientist.

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Robots may yet morph from science fiction to fact

Robots were supposed to make my life easier. George Jetson promised me as much, in so many words, when Astro wasn’t busting me up with a well-timed: “Ruh-roh.”

Even for those who didn’t take their cues from cartoons, there were plenty of serious folks to make us believe that our futures would be simplified by now with household robots that could help with the chores.

So what happened?

That’s the question that made me jump at the opportunity Monday to get a preview of the International Robots & Vision Show, which opens today at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont.

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Wired News: Working Remotely, Robots in Place

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,58961,00.html

PALO ALTO, California — How would you feel about sitting across a conference table from a robot remotely controlled by a colleague who could not make the meeting?

Fears of severe acute respiratory syndrome and terrorism, combined with drastically reduced travel budgets, mean more companies are considering video conferencing as an alternative to face-to-face meetings.

But Hewlett-Packard scientists say the most natural way to “meet” when people are not face to face is to use robots.

The scientists, who work out of HP’s research laboratory in Palo Alto, were recently on hand to prove it, showing off the prototype for a robot that could navigate through the halls of a building, lower itself down to eye level at a conference table and even mix and mingle with associates as if it were a person.

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Sony takes leash off robot dog | CNET News.com

Electronics giant Sony announced new software Monday that will allow Aibo owners to control the robot dog via e-mail commands.

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Wired News: Giving Robots the Gift of Sight

An e-business consultant from the United Kingdom claims to have invented a breakthrough mechanized vision system with a wide range of potential applications, from robotics to handwriting recognition.

Patrick Andrews, managing director of Break-Step Productions, a Cambridge-based consultancy, said he has developed a shape-recognition system called Foveola that closely mimics the human visual system.

A Web-based demonstration of the software, which Andrews says is relatively crude compared to the real thing, already is attracting attention from robotics companies and software developers, although the product has not yet been released to interested parties. (The demo requires visitors to register at the site.)

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In contrast to current shape-recognition systems, Foveola is capable of recognizing a broad range of objects, Andrews said. Most vision systems are designed for specific tasks, such as recognizing text or industrial components.

Andrews declined to give many details, citing pending patent applications, but said the software mimics the processing pathway in humans’ upper visual cortex.

In general, Foveola extracts shapes from a visual scene and assigns them a “mathematical signature.” Like a neural net, the system has to be trained to recognize a shape, and shouldn’t be able to distinguish shapes it hasn’t seen before. It can, however, make a best guess based on the numeric signature it assigns.

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Military robots to get swarm intelligence

A battalion of 120 military robots is to be fitted with swarm intelligence software to enable them to mimic the organised behaviour of insects.

The project, which received funding this week from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is aimed at developing ways to perform missions such as minesweeping and search and rescue with minimum intervention from human operators.

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The 120 robots were built for the US military by I-Robot, a company co-founded by robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks.

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“Pathological configurations”

Swarm intelligence describes the way that complex behaviours can arise from large numbers of individual agents each following very simple rules. For example, ants use the approach to find the most efficient route to a food source.

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ABCNEWS.com : What Defines a Machine as a Robot? The Meaning of Robots

April 23 — To you, that boxy thing in your kitchen that sprays soap and water on your dirty dishes and is decorated with plastic buttons may look like a regular old dishwasher. But some say that machine is really a robot.

A dictionary defines “robot” as a mechanical device that sometimes resembles a human, and is capable of performing a variety of often-complex human tasks on command, or by being programmed in advance.

But engineering professor and robotics expert Ken Goldberg of the University of California at Berkeley has a more exact definition.

“It responds to its environment and it can manipulate its environment. It can do things,” he says, in reference to modern dishwashers that can sense how dirty the dishes are and change its own settings accordingly

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