“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 ]

Nobody seems to know what exactly this is or if anything ever came of it, although the consensus is that it’s probably a dead concept. The two noses are kinda neat, though. I’m not sure what the aerodynamic implications are, but they certainly add a bunch of payload space. I also like the idea of an optionally-manned UCAV… For that matter, why do we need dedicated UAVs at all? Why not just retrofit existing combat aircraft with optional unmanned systems for added flexibility and, for that matter, safety? The answer, of course, is that you can’t make an optionally manned UCAV that looks anywhere near as badass as this.

VIA [ Flight Global ]

Late nineties is fairly prehistoric when it comes to robots with fast reaction times. I mean, I was in high school in the late nineties! But while I was busy being a miserably outcast geek, Toshiba was demonstrating a robot that could (sort of) play volleyball. According to a Toshiba press release from back then, the robot was nicknamed “the beach-volleyball-playing robot” (seriously) and had multiple talents, including voice recognition and individual facial identification.

Toshiba’s press release also included a little bit of development background, where they discussed the present and future of robotics from a perspective that is now 12 years old:

“The 21st century will see robots not only programmed to act in certain ways, but able to respond to their environment, including working with and around people. Such robots will perform sophisticated tasks, including taking care of patients or executing complicated manufacturing processes, on the basis of simple instructions.

Currently, robots, and the objects they work on, must be precisely positioned, and robots require detailed programming to control their movements and actions. All this severely limits repertoire and usefulness.

Toshiba’s new robot demonstrates solution to these problems that will bring greater flexibility and capabilities to robots.”

Robots do still require fairly detailed programming to control their movements and actions, even as they’re getting much better at learning how to learn and make decisions for themselves. They’re also much better at responding to their environment, but working with and around people still hasn’t really come to pass. Toshiba seems to be working as hard as anyone to make all of this stuff work, though, with their series of (still mostly demonstrative) household assistance robots.

[ Toshiba Press Release ] VIA [ Neatorama ]

I love the inhuman speed of pick and place robots. We’ve seen a lot of incredible examples from ABB, but Adept Technology has just broken the “300 cycle per minute barrier” with their Quattro robot. The secret, they say, is that using four arms instead of three enables higher speeds and faster accelerations. If you want to see what 300 cycles per second looks like, pay attention at about 1:30 in the video and remind yourself that you’re not watching it on super fast forward.

[ Press Release ] VIA [ RobotBuzz (Translated) ]

Robots are slowly learning to take advantage of nonverbal cues, which are an integral part of natural human communication. Things like eyebrow movement can be used to convey information about emotional states, but subtle nonverbal cues can also provide more pointed information… Think about how much can be said with a quick glance. Professor Bilge Mutlu from the University of Wisconsin is trying to teach robots to communicate information with glances, by seeing how well effectively they can “leak” the answer to an object guessing game played with a human.

As you can see from the video, two robots took place in this experiment: Robovie R-2, and the creepy as f**k Geminoid. Interestingly, participants in the experiment responded better to cues leaked by Geminoid, while at the same time, the didn’t realize that they were doing so, implying that however deep in the Uncanny Valley Geminoid may reside, in some cases, having a robot with distinctly humanoid features really does make a difference.

There is one itsy bitsy teeny tiny little caveat at the end of the paper: “We found that the leakage cue affected the performance of only pet owners and not others, which might suggest that pet owners become, through their interaction with their pets, more sensitive to nonverbal behavior.” Er, okay, well, I guess it was good for them to check for that kind of thing, but that kinda makes the effects of shifty-eyed robots a lot less impressive.

[ Paper (*.PDF) ]

The video that includes Boston Dynamics’ BigDog getting kicked and slipping on ice is nothing new, and it’s still one of the best robot videos I’ve ever seen. The vid above includes that stuff, but also some footage that I don’t think we’ve seen before of BigDog descending slopes and getting its foot caught in a concrete block. It’s all very impressive, but even more importantly, it’s damn funny stuff.

[ BigDog ]

Some robots are, granted, awesome dancers, but most are just too robot-y. If you think about it, it’s a lot like early computer animation… It’s hard to convincingly mimic all of the subtle movements that humans use when dancing (or doing pretty much anything else). This is exactly why the motion capture suit was invented, and it’s a wonder that nobody’s used them to program a robot before. Or maybe they have, but this is the first video I’ve seen of it in action. And it really does seem to make a difference to the robots’ moves… I’d venture to call them significantly more lifelike.

The research team from South Korea that’s developing this technique is focusing specifically on hip movements, because as you know, your hips are what keep the rest of your body from falling over when you’re bustin’ those crazy dance moves, yo. It still appears to be a fairly restrained system, but if it does for robots what motion capture did for CGI, Dancing With The Stars could get a lot more interesting.

That’s a show, right? I wouldn’t know, ’cause I of course wouldn’t watch anything of the sort.

Unless it had robots in it.

[ IROS Paper ] VIA [ Robots Dreams ]

Have a safe and happy Halloween, and if you see any robots, make sure to destroy them before they steal all your candy. And then steal their candy and send it to me, because candy is awesome and I’m too old to trick or treat in a non-creepy way.

As always, you can catch the other Bots With Stuff from last week over on The Shoebox Blog, including a robot with a puffy shirt and a robot with a hankering for a hunk of cheese.

[ Bots With Stuff ]

As if you don’t have enough distractions while driving, the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab and MIT’s SENSEable City Lab have teamed up to create AIDA, a robot that lives in your dashboard, is way smarter than you, and has no compunctions about letting you know it:

AIDA is actually watching you while you drive, paying attention to your expressions and even measuring your galvanic skin response through the steering wheel. Based on your driving habits, AIDA will suggest how you can be safer or more efficient. The robot is designed to use expressions to intuitively convey information, something that MIT has a lot of experience with. You know who AIDA reminds me of, though?

AIDA may have her dad’s skinny neck and blocky head, but her face is all mom.

I’ll bet you can’t guess who’s helping sponsor this project… Here’s a hint: it’s not Pixar. Yep, it’s Audi. AKA Volkswagen. AKA the robot car company. AIDA was, in fact, developed in partnership with the Volkswagen Electronics Research Lab out in Palo Alto. It’s really, I dunno, inspiring or something to see a major car company investing so much in future technology. Next time I buy a new car, which is probably going to be never (94 Volvo wagon FTW!), it might very well be a Volkswagen, especially if it can park itself.

[ AIDA ] VIA [ MIT ]

iRobot may have a virtual monopoly on the robot vacuum cleaner market, but unfortunately, there’s not a whole heck of a lot of money there yet. They’ve got their military robots, of course, but it looks like they’re looking to expand their civilian market. No, it’s not a lawn mower division, but rather a healthcare robotics unit, or more specifically, an elder care robotics unit. iRobot is taking a bit of a cue from Asia here, since Korea and Japan have been working (feverishly) on elder care robotics for some time now… Of course, people in Asia (of all generations) generally seem a lot more comfortable with robots and more willing to accept them into their lives, while iRobot as a bit of an uphill struggle with that sort of thing around here.

So what might we expect to see in the way of products from this new division? Here’s my guess: a small mobile platform that integrates the telepresence features of the ConnectR with some kind of simple artificial intelligence that could locate and recognize people, deliver reminders and information based on natural language voice queries, and summon help in an emergency. It would be connected to the internet and could integrate with, say, a doctor’s office or a pharmacy to provide prescription schedules and monitor drug interactions.

Interesting, the only clue that we’ve got so far is not something I would have expected: “an inexpensive, balloon-shaped device that uses a small vacuum pump will let robots gently grab and then lift up various items for older home dwellers. Using a handheld version, Angle demonstrated the device’s ability to mold, blob-like, around odd-shaped objects and then hold them firmly when he used a mini-pump to apply the vacuum.” A grabber and lifter? That implies a fairly complex stereo vision system with object recognition, and probably a significantly more expensive robot. But as Angle points out, institutional care for the elderly costs an average of $10k per month, so a robot that helps people live in their homes longer will have to work hard to outprice its potential market… Especially if it gets insurance subsidies. Hey, can someone who’s read the new health care bill let me know if there’s a robot option in there somewhere?

Incidentally, iRobot already developed a prototype elder care robot, named Cici, which was reportedly on display at a medical devices conference in Boston in December of 2007. Although there were no pictures and iRobot refused to comment, we do know that Cici “stood about the size of a desktop computer and was the shape of a human upper body without arms. The robot has audio features that can be used to check on elderly patients at home and would be linked to a network to alert clinicians elsewhere of a medical problem.”

Press release, after the jump. (Read more…)