Most telepresence robots (with a few exceptions) aren’t especially presence-y, in that you can see people, and people can see you, but you’re pretty much just a head on a screen on a robotic stick with wheels. MeBot, a project from the Personal Robotics Group at MIT, adds a little bit of personality to telepresence by providing ways for users to communicate non-verbally, through things like head movement, arm movement, and posture:

The clever bit is that you, as the user, don’t need to tell the robot to do any of the expressive stuff that it does with its screen. It watches what you’re doing with your head, and duplicates those socially expressive movements with the robot. Is it effective? You bet:

We conducted an experiment that evaluated how people perceived a robot-mediated operator differently when they used a static telerobot versus a physically embodied and expressive telerobot. Results showed that people felt more psychologically involved and more engaged in the interaction with their remote partners when they were embodied in a socially expressive way. People also reported much higher levels of cooperation both on their own part and their partners as well as a higher score for enjoyment in the interaction.

Even though it has those little 3 DoF arms, MeBot isn’t designed to do anything in particular with its additional axes of motion. You currently control them sympathetically using a second set of arms, the positions and movements of which are duplicated by the arms on the robot. Conceivably, you could add some grippers to the robot and a more comprehensive control system on the other end, but that would defeat a large part of the purpose (and the beauty) of MeBot: it’s designed to be purely expressive, implying a natural simplicity that requires no extra effort or skill. It just does its thing while you do yours, which is how all the best systems (hardware and software alike) tend to function.

Another vid with a few more details, after the jump. (Read more…)

The NY Times posted an article online on Tuesday about food serving robots. We’ve already covered pretty much all of the bots in the article here on BotJunkie (like Snackbot, Motoman, Chief Cook, ramen bots, sushi hand, and that octopus balls robot)

But, there was this interesting quote:

Dr. Heather Knight, a roboticist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that the industry is trying to change “the perception of robots.”

“The Japanese have always been more comfortable with it, but particularly in the West, there’s this whole Frankenstein thing that if we try to make something in the image of man, to make a new creature, we’re stealing the role of God, and it’s going to turn out wrong because that’s not our role,” she said.

Dr. Knight goes on to suggest that having robots serve people food will get people to like robots, ’cause people like food. Maybe that’s true. I’m not entirely sure, though, about the premise that service robots in general (or perhaps humanoid service robots specifically) make people uncomfortable because of this Frankenstein effect involving humans, uh, overstepping our bounds (I guess?) when it comes to creating things. I’m inclined to believe that it’s something more straightforward: robots are foreign to our general experience, and that makes people uncomfortable. You could argue, I suppose, that this is just semantics, and that robots are foreign to us because we’re not ‘meant’ to be creating them, but I wouldn’t want to suggest that because something makes us uncomfortable there’s something inherently wrong about it. Really, it’s just a matter of education (and cultural education), and you can cite any number of historical precedents to this. Anyway, it’s an interesting thing to think about.

Dr. Knight gave at talk at Ignite LA last fall on social robotics, here’s the vid:

This brings up another interesting issue, that of trust… I feel like it might be possible to trust the current generation of robots in the same way that you trust a business partner, but social trust is another matter entirely. It’s going to be hard to make that happen, since social trust is such a nebulous thing, and it’ll take a lot of hard work by social roboticists to make it happen.

[ NY Times ]
[ Dr. Heather Knight ]

You can buy a shirt with Franken-Bot on it here

Thanks Stark!

Matt Bunting, a senior at the University of Arizona in electrical engineering, built himself a hexapod as a final project for his class on cognitive robotics. Built mostly from spare parts, the robot uses an Intel Atom processor powering an Ubuntu OS computer. A Logitech QuickCam mounted on the front of the bot watches what happens when movements are initiated, and uses the changing scene to determine what effect the movements are having. This lets the robot adaptively learn how to move, rather than relying on programming:

“One of the things I wanted to explore was the idea of reinforcement learning. What I wanted to do was not preprogram any of those walking algorithms, I wanted it to figure out how to walk straight forward on its own,” Bunting said. “It has the ability to figure it out itself.”

Bunting’s professor Tony Lewis says the bot’s learning algorithm can be applied to tasks other than walking. If a leg breaks or a motor gets damaged, for example, it can relearn how to walk. The robot even has foot contact sensors that can be used for terrain adaptation.

Pretty cool, right? A couple days after Matt posted a video of his bot on YouTube, Intel ordered themselves two copies to take on an international publicity tour for the Atom processor. Then, the company who provided Matt with the servos, CrustCrawler Robotics, asked Matt to help develop software for some of their hexapod kits.

So, let this be a lesson to all you DIY roboticists out there: if you build something cool, Intel will buy it, and you’ll be offered a job at a robotics company.

[ University of Arizona ] VIA [ Crave ]

Next door to CES is the Adult Entertainment Expo, and as a journalist, it’s my obligation to go. And I heard that the world’s first sex robot was going to be making its (her?) debut. The official press conference is on Saturday, and they’re saving the actual robot features until then, but I spent about 10 minutes interviewing the CEO of True Companion about the robot to get an overview and some background.

We’ve got a video after the break that’s probably NSFW, since it shows a scantily clad (but not naked) android and there is some mild discussion of sex. I’d probably call it PG-13, but certainly not R or X. If this type of thing bothers you, no worries, just skip this post. (Read more…)

If we ever find ourselves with our own household robots, they’re going to need to be able to learn from us, because there will be all kinds of wild and crazy stuff that we want our robots to be able to do that the robot designers won’t have thought of. So, the ability to teach robots new tasks is rather important. But even more important is teaching robots to generalize one thing or task and apply it to many different variations on that thing or task. Back in September, we wrote about an ASIMO that learned to generalize different types of objects: show it a chair, and ASIMO could figure out what other objects were chair-like.

PR2 has taken this concept of generalization a step further by applying it to actions, not just things. When you teach PR2 an action (by providing an example of the action), PR2 can understand the fundamental components of the action and apply them to different variations of the action. So like, if you teach PR2 to pour a beverage out of a can into a cup, it then doesn’t matter what kind of can or what kind of cup or where they are relative to each other or if you move them around in the middle. This is hugely, hugely important for robots to be able to do, because having to teach a robot an action for “pour from can into cup on counter” and then a separate action for “pour from can into cup on low table” isn’t just tedious, it’s one of those things that is going to keep anyone from wanting to be involved with the robot at all.

There are a lot of major obstacles to surmount when it comes to creating a robot that can be practical and useful around people who know nothing about robots… From stuff like plugging into a normal outlet to recharge to not squeezing things too hard. It’s awesome to see Willow Garage and PR2 tackling these critical objectives and finding solutions that work.

[ Willow Garage ]

You’re probably familiar with the Trolley Problem ethical thought experiment, but if you’re not, here’s the question:

A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by the mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?

There are a whole bunch of different variations on this scenario, involving fat people and organ donors, but according to morality and ethics researchers, “factors such as gender, age, education level, and cultural background have little influence on the judgments people make, in part because those judgments are generated by an unconscious “moral grammar” that is analogous in some respects to the unconscious linguistic grammars that support ordinary language use.” So basically, there are ‘built in’ rules of ethics that humans have.

Lu├¡s Moniz Pereira of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal and Ari Saptawijaya of the Universitas Indonesia have published a paper entitled “Modeling Morality with Prospective Logic” in which they discuss using the answers to ethical questions like the Trolley Problem to create a piece of software that answers such questions the same way a human would. This is not yet a broad spectrum ethical governor like Ronald Arkin is working on, and it’s not designed for military situations, but it does suggest that it’s possible to endow robots with software that gives them the capability to make ethical decisions that are at least consistent with the decisions that a human would make. Whether those decisions are best, of course, is an entirely different matter… But that’s the great thing about robots: when you find something that works better, you just reprogram them.

VIA [ Technovelgy ]

So yeah, robot cars are getting smarter, but they’re not quite yet ready to take over the driving duties from us human. The European Union is about to start funding a research project to investigate the feasibility of vehicles traveling on highways in “platoons,” where the lead vehicle is driven by a professional and the rest of the cars just play follow the leader while their drivers “take their hands off the wheel, read a book or watch TV.” It’s better than just being able to relax, though: if the lead vehicle is a truck, the cars following along in its wake are about 20% more efficient (although the Mythbusters showed that close drafting can improve that to 40%).

If you think about what type of hardware and software is necessary to do this type of thing, it’s all pretty much already available. The car doesn’t really have to be intelligent… It needs adaptive cruise control, which you can find everywhere, plus some way of following the car in front of it during gradual highway turns, which is as easy as cake. The only tricky part is entering and exiting the platoons. Cars entering just have to pull up behind the platoon, but for exiting, the platoon will space out to let a car in the middle leave and the driver will need to resume control, which potentially gets into liability issues.

Even if there are some things to work out, this is a seriously brilliant idea. I mean, how much would you pay (say, per hour) to not have to drive? Or looking at it another way, what if the money you saved in fuel went to the professional driver at the front of the train? It’s a win for them, a win for you, and a win for the environment. Yay!

The research project will run for three years, including on-road trials in Spain.

[ BBC ]

“David Hanson’s robot faces look and act like yours: They recognize and respond to emotion, and make expressions of their own. Here, an “emotional” live demo of the Einstein robot offers a peek at a future where robots truly mimic humans.”

[ Hanson Robotics ]

This is Hussain ibn Abdullah ibn Hassan ibn Ali ibn-E-Sina, but you can just call him Ibn Sina. And he’s doing fine, Thanks To God. Ibn Sina is the world’s first Arabic speaking humanoid robot, under development at the Interactive Robots and Media Lab (IRML) of the United Arab Emirates University. While the robot itself is authentically Arab, you can thank the French for the fact that he’s so talkative… His vocal engine (called “Nizar”) comes from a French company called Acapela that develops natural language software.

Ibn Sina is named after a Persian physician and philosopher who lived about a thousand years ago. He’s more than happy to talk about whatever you want, using natural conversational steps and responding to language cues… Just make sure you don’t ask him about chicks.

[ IRML ] VIA [ Gulfnews ] and [ Gizmo Watch ]

At the official public introduction to the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory and Stanford’s new robotic car on Saturday, the VAIL showed off their latest foray into intelligent vehicle technology: an autonomous valet parking system. The system does exactly what you’re probably hoping it does: you get out if the car, tell it to park itself, and off it goes to do just that:

And of course, when you’re ready to go home, you just call the car back and it’ll be waiting for you. VAIL researchers are envisioning something like an iPhone app to control all this, but it doesn’t need to be any more complicated than a “park” button and a “return” button. The car does the rest, all by itself.

The most awesome part of all this is that the Volkswagen Passat used in this demo, Junior 3, is almost (almost) entirely stock, as far as the hardware goes. There are three different primary sensors in use: a front radar (which is available as part of Volkswagen’s adaptive cruise control system), a camera mounted in front of the rear view mirror (also available for night driving assistance), and a couple little off the shelf LIDAR units mounted on the sides. The LIDAR isn’t currently part of any option package, of course, but Volkswagen does offer other side looking sensors, like lane assist and blind spot detection. The only other major difference is the giant rack of computers in the trunk, but it turns out that the computer system is a standard package for Stanford’s autonomous vehicles, and the computer that comes with the car is actually capable of running everything. Bottom line is, we’re technologically more or less ready for autonomous parking already, with in production vehicles.

So what’s the hold-up? Well, the car currently can’t detect obstacles. Like, you know, people. There’s no reason it couldn’t do that with the current hardware, and that’s in fact the next step, but it’s still a huge liability issue that Volkswagen doesn’t want to tackle. The car also needs a detailed map of the parking lot, so you wouldn’t be able to just drop it off anywhere (yet). So when we first see this technology, VAIL envisions parking garages that are specifically designed for self parking vehicles. There would be a drop off area, and no pedestrians would be allowed in the garage, which wouldn’t need elevators, stairs, walkways, or even lights. This infrastructure isn’t ready yet, but the vehicle technology is here now.

It’s a little bit frustrating to robotics proponents like myself that in cases like these, it seems as if technology is advancing faster than society is prepared for. This is part of what VAIL is here for, though… To figure out not just the technology, but also tackle all of the related issues. There are a bunch of really smart people working on this stuff, and I have to say, if they continue making strides like this, we’re all gonna be worrying a lot less about driving in the near future.