Democrat & Chronicle: UR robot to strut its stuff

(July 23, 2002) — Toting a food tray, the server came to a stop, stared at Tom Kollar’s face and offered a snack. “Hello, my name is Mabel. Would you like an hors d’oeuvre?”

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Mabel’s small, wheeled base is a robot itself, bought with some research grant money.

Atop that base are a variety of sensors, camera and microphone, a speaker so Mabel can talk back and a Webcam that keeps an eye on how much food is gone from the tray.

The robot is loaded with voice recognition and facial recognition programs. It will look around for what it thinks are people, focuses its camera and microphone on what it believes are faces, and offers food. If the face moves around, the camera will follow.

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Showcase for digital entertainment

Want to know how the characters in Star Wars Episode II were created, find out how computer games will change the way we use computers?

Or how a robot called Lewis could be your wedding photographer? Well, then Siggraph 2002 could be for you.

At one of the world’s largest multimedia conferences in the world, held this year in San Antonio, Texas, US, more than 6,500 international experts will reveal the digital future of the entertainment industry.

Siggraph – Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques – is now in its 29th year.

The annual six-day conference attracts experts in animation, computer graphics, robotics and digital art. It is a meeting of the people who create what we watch on the big screen to the computer screen and how we watch it.

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Digital voyages

Highlights this year include a keynote address from Esther Dyson, often described as the most influential woman in cyberspace, who will explore issues of control and identity on the internet.

Talks and demonstrations promise enlightening voyages into the creation of Middle Earth for the film Lord of the Rings, and the Star Wars universe.

Across the hall, Lewis the robotic photographer will try to snap your photograph, while Public Anemone, an organic, sea anemone-like “robot creature” will emotively respond as you tap on its tank.

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(Siggraph facts:

29th conference

20,000 anticipated visitors

6,000 international visitors

300 exhibitors)

At the crossroads of terror: Inside the clandestine operations center where the CIA tries to anticipate what al-Qaeda will do next

CIA scientists are investigating exotic supercomputer programs and artificial intelligence that might help analysts link hundreds of thousands of names, places and bank accounts.

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The Counterterrorism Center, or CTC, as veteran hands call it, has become the CIA’s busiest outfit. Organized in 1986 to coordinate America’s effort to foil terrorists overseas, the center has doubled its manpower since the Sept. 11 attacks to more than 1,100 analysts and clandestine agents. Some 2,500 cables pour into the CTC every day from CIA stations around the world, from interrogators interviewing al-Qaeda prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and from foreign intelligence services that have tips on terrorists.

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The center is trying to do what it could not do before: pluck obscure bits of information from the flood of often irrelevant or insignificant data and connect the dots to foil a major new attack.

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Robots hardly cricket

Somewhere in cricket-crazed England an electronics company has spent a six-figure sum to invent the game’s version of Cyclops, the beeping robot that makes tennis line calls.

The thinking is the new gadget will intervene when bowlers overstep the crease and deliver a no-ball.

A beep would be heard in the umpire’s ear and he would signal a no-ball.

As is so often the case in technological debates, the logic sounds flawless.

With the electronic eye taking care of no-ball calls, the umpire would not have to look down at the crease for a split second before he looks up for the more important business of deciding what happens at the other end.

It sounds like the breakthrough of the year . . . but is it?

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The International Cricket Council has lit the fuse for an emotion charged debate by letting umpires use technology for any decision they are not certain about, including lbw verdicts, in the Champions Trophy in Sri Lanka in September.

Many cricket people have simply had a gutful of technological intrusions into the ancient game.

It’s worthwhile remembering several years ago tennis officials considered employing a new system where iron fibres were placed in the coating of a tennis ball and a magnetic field used for all line decisions (as opposed to Cyclops which operates exclusively on the service line).

But it was rejected on the basis that tennis still wanted to be a human game.

Someone quipped there were enough robots playing the game. You don’t want them on every sideline as well.

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Robot servants–sooner than you think

Sony’s Aibo robot and Honda’s Asimo robot lines have proven that there is at least some level of acceptance of robots in the home. Now the question becomes when will those robots wash windows and trim hedges?

In the suburbs of Tokyo, researchers from NEC have been working on robots that can “help around the house.” It all started when the researchers realized that several of their ongoing projects, including speech recognition and optical sensing, could come together to allow a robot to see and hear.

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PaPeRo’s “eyes” consist of two CCD cameras, and with them PaPeRo can recognize up to ten faces. Four microphones–three to detect the direction from which a sound came and one for speech recognition of up to 650 words–act as PaPeRo’s “ears.”

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In a demonstration, PaPeRo recognized Fujita, engaged in a bit of small talk, and then accepted the verbal order to take a voice message. When PaPeRo met with the person for whom the message was intended, he would recognize the person’s face, and offer to play the voice message for them (“Obi-Wan, you are our only hope.”). Fujita then asked the robot to turn on the television, which was accomplished via PaPeRo’s infra-red transmitter. PaPeRo was also able to change stations for Fujita, accepting requests by name of the station.

NEC’s vision is “to partner (with) people in their homes with the underlying aim of improving (the) human-machine interface through introducing robots into our everyday lives.” While PaPeRo certainly does not threaten the jobs of butlers and maids just yet, this demonstration was merely a taste of things to come. 70 families in Japan have PaPeRo robots in their homes, doing real-world testing.

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Fujita says a robot builder’s work is never done, as robots will always be compared to humans rather than appliances.

Scientists give language lessons to robots

“I hope a year from now I can tell it: ‘Look out for that trash can’ or ‘Let’s go through that door.’ I don’t want to be holding the robot’s hand,” he said.

In five years, Oates added, “I want to be able to say things like, ‘Could you go into the room we were just in and bring me the red ball?’ If the robot can do that, I’ll declare it a success. It’s a very ambitious but not unreasonable goal.”

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Typical session

The little robot was equipped with eyes (a video camera), ears (a microphone), a voice box and a computer program able to recognize and pronounce human words. Steels pre-programmed AIBO to recognize a few spoken words like “look. . . listen. . . what is it? . . . good . . . yes. . . no.”

In a report published on the Internet, Steels described a typical learning session: On a table in front of AIBO are three objects — a red ball, a yellow puppet called Smiley and a toy dog called Poo-chi. AIBO already knows the names of Smiley and Poo-chi, but not the word “ball.” The human teacher points to the ball and speaks:

Human: Look. Ball

AIBO: Ball?

Human: Yes.

Human: What is it?

AIBO: Smiley.

Human: No, listen. Ball.

AIBO: Ball?

Human: Yes.

Human: Is it Smiley?

AIBO: No, ball.

Human: Good.

To accomplish this feat, the robot had to connect two very different electronic patterns — one from the sound waves coming into his “ears” and the other from the light waves coming into its “eyes” — and form the concept, “ball.”

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“We have demonstrated that a robot can learn the meanings of words,” summed up Paul Cohen, a computer scientist and colleague of Oates at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Soccer Robots Compete for 6th Annual RoboCup

(RoboCup Photo Gallery)

Robots of all shapes and sizes kick off in an international soccer tournament this week with nearly 200 teams from 30 nations battling it out in a domed stadium in Fukuoka, Japan—not the World Cup but the 6th annual RoboCup. Some players look like cubes on wheels, others like dogs. And this year, for the first time since the games began in 1997, RoboCup will have a humanoid league with 12 teams from six countries. Some coaches—researchers and academics—are betting that a fully autonomous robot soccer team will outplay the human world champions by 2050.

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But RoboCup does more than demonstrate how androids can put a ball between goal posts. Machines designed to play soccer can also be adapted to handle tasks that would be difficult or dangerous for humans, such as cleaning up nuclear wastes, exploring space, gathering military intelligence, or searching for survivors after disasters. RoboCup also has a robot rescue division—particularly relevant given the use of robots at the World Trade Center site last year. Robots in this league are tested on their abilities to find mannequins trapped inside a three-story building that has collapsed.

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News: Are you ready for angry robots?

Imagine a “friendly fridge” that could have its own personality, or a child’s toy that would do more than imitate feelings.

An Australian company called Mindsystems has devised an Artificial Intelligence system for simulating human emotion. It can apparently be used to quite convincingly replicate a person’s feelings in a variety of situations. Called EMIR (Emotional Model for Intelligent Response), it is based on real-time data collected by researchers in the psychological sciences

Mindsystems predicts EMIR could be used for virtually every system that has a human-machine interface. It goes as far as imagining a stock-market simulation that could predict how thousands of investors would react emotionally to certain information.

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The system includes simulation for feelings that are somewhat surprising. For example, the system can simulate boredom.

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The Guardian – News – Story – Robot fails to find a place in the sun

After four months of entertaining humans, Gaak the predator robot yesterday did what all the best robots do in science fiction: he copied his masters’ most basic instinct and made a dash for freedom.

Programmed to sink a metal fang into smaller but more nimble prey robots, to “eat” their electric power, at a science adventure centre, Gaak showed that a two year experiment in maturing robot “thinking” may be proving alarmingly successful.

Left unattended for 15 minutes, the 2ft metal machine crept along a barrier until it found a gap, squeezed through, navigated across a car park and reached the Magna science centre’s exit by the M1 motorway in Rotherham, South Yorkshire.

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Plustech Walking technology

The walking forest machine is Plustech’s best-known innovation.

The goal of product development was a machine that has the best

possible working stability and minimum impact to the terrain.

The walking machine adapts automatically to the forest floor.

Moving on six articulated legs, the harvester advances forward

and backward, sideways and diagonally. It can also turn in

place and step over obstacles. Depending on the irregularity of

the terrain, the operator can adjust both the ground clearance of

the machine and the height of each step.

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