Advanced Humanoid Male Robot Robots that fly... and cooperate The dynamics of this robot are quite complicated. In fact, they live in a 12-dimensional space. — Vijay Kumar Synopsis Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other and form ad hoc teams – for construction, surveying disasters and far more. About the Speaker At the University of Pennsylvania, Vijay Kumar studies the control and coordination of multi-robot formations.
Unfair Advantages of Emotional Computing Unfair Advantages of Emotional Computing Earlier this week, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son announced an amazing new robot called Pepper. The most amazing feature isn't that it will only cost $2,000, or that Pepper is intended to babysit your kids and work the registers at retail stores. What's really remarkable is that Pepper is designed to understand and respond to human emotion. Heck, understanding human emotion is tough enough for most HUMANS. There is a new field of "affect computing" coming your way that will give entrepreneurs and marketers a real unfair advantage. What are the unfair advantages? Take Beyond Verbal, a start-up in Tel Aviv, for example. Better than that, the software itself can also pinpoint and influence how consumers make decisions. For example, if this person is an innovator, you want to offer the latest and greatest product. Talk about targeted advertising! How can this improve quality of life? She tells a story about how she and her boyfriend were in a nasty fight.
untitled The Personality Forge AI - About Artificial Intelligence Chat Bots Welcome to the Personality Forge, an advanced artificial intelligence chat bot platform and living community of chat bots and people. Here people create and work on AI Personalities called chat bots who, once created, have an independent existence, chatting with both real people and other chat bots. While you're away, they're having conversations, making friends, and making memories that you can look in on. The Personality Forge's AI Engine integrates memories, emotions, knowledge of hundreds of thousands of words, sentence structure, unmatched pattern-matching capabilities, and a scripting language called AIScript. It's the heart and mind of all the bots here, and it's easy enough to work with that you need no programming experience to get started. You can chat with bots, post messages on different topics in the forums, and become a part of the first-ever AI & Human online community. Getting Started: You may want to start by chatting with some of our chat bots.
A Wikipedia for robots (Credit: TU/e) European scientists from six institutes and two universities have developed an online platform where robots can learn new skills from each other worldwide — a kind of “Wikipedia for robots.” The objective is to help develop robots better at helping elders with caring and household tasks. “The problem right now is that robots are often developed specifically for one task”, says René van de Molengraft, TU/e researcher and RoboEarth project leader. “RoboEarth simply lets robots learn new tasks and situations from each other. In addition, some computing and “thinking” tasks can be carried out by the system’s “cloud engine,” he said, “so the robot doesn’t need to have as much computing or battery power on‑board.” RoboEarth architecture: a database is accessible via high-bandwidth connections to robots’ cloud computing environments in the RoboEarth Cloud Engine (credit: RoboEarth) For example, a robot can image a hospital room and upload the resulting map to RoboEarth.
Falling in love with AI virtual assistants: a creepy love affair nearer than you think "I've never loved anyone the way I've loved you," swoons Joaquin Phoenix, in the movie Her. Being a Hollywood production, you might think he's chatting to a bikini-clad twentysomething, or maybe a quirky bookish type with big glasses and an even bigger heart. But it's neither. In fact, he isn't talking to anybody. "The very tiniest seed [forHer] came ten years ago when I went to a website and IM-ed this address," director Spike Jonze told the Guardian. "Being able to talk to the Scarlett Johansson personal assistant as he does, we're not there yet -- but it's not as far away as people think," he told Wired.co.uk. Nuance tries to delay the uncanny valley effect through a combination of natural language understanding, machine learning, context modelling and user preferences. "Language is this powerful programming language we all know," explains Nuance CTO Vlad Sejnoha. Sejnoha says every aspect of Nuance's system improves each year, and they have 1,000 researchers working solely on AI.
Google patents customisable robot personalities Do you like your robots subservient and complimentary, or glib and a little bit cheeky? A patent that has just been awarded to Google suggests that either could be possible and that we could potentially download different personality types from the cloud. In fact, if you can't choose what kind of personality you want for your future robo-pal, it's highly possible that it might be able to choose for you. It would do this by accessing your devices and learning about you, before configuring a tailored personality based on that information. The original question posed still stands though -- you could potentially always choose a specific personality type for your Google robot that represents the kind of person you enjoy interacting with. It also suggests that should a cruel fate befall your robot, that might not spell the end of its days. We'd probably be cool with a robot Taylor Swift or Andrew WK to issue kind, wise words and life and party advice to us though.
Researchers Create Thousand Strong Swarm Of Bots That Can Assemble Into Complex Shapes By itself, this simple little puck-shaped robot is cute, but not revolutionary: It’s a few centimeters across, stands on three pin-like legs, moves a centimeter a second, and costs about $20. Put a thousand or so of these Kilobots together, and you have the largest robotic swarm the world has ever seen. Self-assembling robotic systems exist, but they’ve been limited to dozens, maybe a few hundred robots. Now, a trio of Harvard researchers led by Michael Rubenstein has programmed 1,024 Kilobots to organize themselves into various shapes, such as stars, a wrench, and letters of the alphabet. The work was published in Science this week. Kilobots were designed to mimic the behavior of a swarm of bees, colony of army ants, or flock of starlings. These inexpensive robots have two little vibrating motors to help them slide across surfaces on their skinny rigid legs. The infrared transmitters are also used by the scientists to give commands to all the bots simultaneously. Photo Gallery
Robot Olympics Planned for 2020 Powered by Japan’s ‘Robot Revolution’ Japan likes robots. And while some Americans raised on a confusing sci-fi diet of Star Wars, Terminator, and iRobot are perhaps a little wary of advanced AI and robotics—Japan simply can’t wait for the “robot revolution.” In a recent tour of Japanese robotics firms, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe declared his intention to create a government task force to study and propose strategies for tripling the size of Japan’s robotics industry to $24 billion. And one more thing, Abe said, “In 2020, I would like to gather all of the world’s robots and aim to hold an Olympics where they compete in technical skills.” While mere mortals compete in the 2020 summer Olympics in Tokyo—in a stadium somewhere nearby, the world’s most advanced robots may go head to head in events showcasing their considerable prowess (hopefully by then, right?). Team Case autonomous vehicle, DEXTER, at the DARPA Grand Challenge. Holding an all-robot competition is by no means a new idea.
Robotics Institute Research Guide : Medical Robotics In the area of Medical Robotics, current projects at RI span basic and applied research in multiple areas, including: 1. Computer-assisted surgery,2. Interventional robots,3. Smart medical and diagnostic tools,4. 2D and 3D medical image analysis and informatics,5. Virtual and augmented reality, and 6. Due to overlap with the QoLT initiative, such areas as (i) rehabilitative and prosthetic devices, (ii) assisted living, (iii) preventive healthcare equipment, and (iv) continuous healthcare process improvement could also be considered a part of medical robotic activities, but are left to the QoLT-section to be addressed there. Beginning over 15 years ago, the RI established itself as a world leader in computer-assisted surgery, focusing on development of more accurate and less invasive orthopaedic procedures (DiGioia, Jaramaz, Kanade). Several of our faculty are developing new, better surgical devices and techniques. Continue Reading: MEMS/MicroRobotics
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