PackBot Responds To Gestures, Follows You Around
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Wednesday, 18 of March , 2009 at 2:55 am
Human robot interaction is one of the areas of robotics that is most critical to robots being accepted into society. At the moment, we’ve got robots that can do all kinds of cool stuff, but most of the cool stuff doesn’t work without a thirty seven channel remote control and a graduate degree. We want robots we can gesture at, talk to, and trust to behave in a reasonable and predictable manner even when we don’t give them explicit instructions on how to do that.
The Brown University Robotics Group has been able to teach a PackBot to respond to verbal commands, gestural commands, and is capable of following a human around. The robot has a depth imaging camera which is able to interpret both shapes and distances, enabling the robot to recognize gestures and the human giving the gesture by analyzing how the silhouette of the human changes. It can then correlate a particular silhouette with a particular human, and follow that human. The PackBot is very good at keeping a respectful distance, and also knows enough to back up if necessary.
All of these things may seem like relatively minor features, but they add up to a robot that responds to a much more intuitive control system than has generally been possible. It follows you around without you having to think about it or worry about it. If you need to leave it alone, you can leave it alone and it’ll wait for you. If you need it to do something, you can turn around and tell it, or you can gesture to it and it understands just as well. It’s all a little bit military-y at the moment (the lab was shockingly sponsored by DARPA), but I’m fairly sure it’s a modular system… You could just as easily get the PackBot to respond to, say, beckoning to get it to follow you.
This is really one of the biggest hurdles to consumer robotics: robots need to be easy to use. Why is the Roomba the only real consumer robot that you’re likely to find in someone’s house? It’s because you tell it what to do by pushing a button, and then you don’t have to think about it anymore. If service robots are going to break into our homes (figuratively, of course), they’re going to need to learn to act more like this PackBot: responding to what we say and gestures we make without the need for anything more complicated. It needs to be simple, it needs to be easy, and it needs to just work.
[ Press Release ] VIA [ Robot Living ]
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Category: Artificial Intelligence,Research
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Comment by Ivory Heidi
Made Thursday, 15 of December , 2011 at 8:36 pm
Amongst me and my husband we’ve owned extra MP3 players in excess of the many years than I can depend, which include Sansas, iRivers, iPods (traditional & feel), the Ibiza Rhapsody, and so forth. But, the last number of a long time I’ve settled straight down to a person line of gamers. Why? Since I used to be pleased to find out how very well-developed and pleasurable to implement the underappreciated (and widely mocked) Zunes are.
