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anyone for a crying baby robot?

for the dad's out there...

Babies learn about the world by exploring how their bodies move in space, grabbing toys, pushing things off tables and by watching and imitating what adults are doing. But when roboticists want to teach a robot how to do a task, they typically either write code or physically move a robot's arm or body to show it how to perform an action.

Little update on our lunch conversation - I was wrong the baby cow stomach juice does not go into buttermilk but into cheese! Enjoy! :-D

A bit of self-ad here :-) Hear my lab colleague Tony Morse speaking about developmental robotics, and meet our little iCub... As a bonus, have a peep into the kitchen and messy lab of the guys downstairs... my office is of course much nicer!!!

"and yet one (idea) that allowed to make new predictions that are now being tested in children"!!! Which one? I am curious.

Will ask him today...

should we buy this to educate behaviour at ACT meetings ... or only for our babies :-) 

His little sister is called "Bing"... not?

Toward Autonomous Humanoids check out our new video with the iCub in the IM-CLeVeR project

Admit it ... You have fallen in love ....

you dont' know how often we had to shoot that scene :) but it is an adorable baby robot (if it works :))

nice conclusion! Published paper: "Statistical method for classifying cries of baby based on pattern recognition of power spectrum" in Int. J. Biometrics, 2010, 2, 113-123

This must have been a hot topic is space research during last months... well, at least within the ESA's Advanced Concepts Team ;-)

Chicks' ability to add and subtract objects as they were moved behind two screens.

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. The simulation results made me think of Jojo's attempts to make a self-assembling space structure. Seems he may have been on the right track, just not thinking big enough

:-P Thanks Thijs... I do not agree with the premise of the article that a possible correlation of energy dissipation in living systems and their fitness means that one is the cause for the other - it may just be that both go hand-in-hand because of the nature of the world that we live in. Maybe there is such a drive for pre-biotic systems (like crystals and amino acids), but once life as we know it exists (i.e., heredity + mutation) it is hard to see the need for an amendment of Darwin's principles. The following just misses the essence of Darwin: "If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve." Darwin's principle in its simplest expression just says that if a genome is more effective at reproducing it is more likely to dominate the next generation. The beauty of it is that there is NO need for a steering mechanism (like maximize energy dissipation) any random set of mutations will still lead to an increase of reproductive effectiveness. BTW: what does "better at dissipating energy" even mean? If I run around all the time I will have more babies? Most species that prove to be very successful end up being very good at conserving energy: trees, turtles, worms. Even complexity of an organism is not a recipe for evolutionary success: jellyfish have been successful for hundreds of millions of years while polar bears are seem to be on the way out.

Hasta la vista, baby. A real-life T-1000, the shape-shifting liquid-metal robot from Terminator 2, is a step closer, thanks to a self-powered liquid metal motor. The device is surprisingly simple: just a drop of metal alloy made mostly of gallium - which is liquid at just under 30 °C - with some indium and tin mixed in.

Jarvis could make it, add a power supply and aquarium and we are off :)