Robotics & AI

The Russian policeman waved at the orange van zigzagging around the empty plaza, ordering it to stop. The van didn’t, so the officer stepped closer to address the driver. But there was no driver. The van is an autonomous vehicle developed at the University of Parma’s Artificial Vision and Intelligent Systems Laboratory, known as VisLab. Crammed with computers, cameras, and sensors, the vehicle is capable of detecting cars, lanes, and obstacles -- and drive itself. The VisLab researchers, after getting tired of testing their vehicles in laboratory conditions, decided to set out on a real-world test drive: a 13,000-kilometer, three-month intercontinental journey from Parma to Shanghai. The group is now about halfway through their trip, which started in July and will end in late October, at the 2010 World Expo in China. (See real time location and live video.)

Can a computer read your body language? A consortium of European researchers thinks so, and has developed a range of innovative solutions from escalator safety to online marketing. The keyboard and mouse are no longer the only means of communicating with computers. Modern consumer devices will respond to the touch of a finger and even the spoken word, but can we go further still? Can a computer learn to make sense of how we walk and stand, to understand our gestures and even to read our facial expressions?The EU-funded MIAUCE project set out to do just that. "The motivation of the project is to put humans in the loop of interaction between the computer and their environment,” explains project coordinator Chaabane Djeraba, of CNRS in Lille. “We would like to have a form of ambient intelligence where computers are completely hidden,” he says. “This means a multimodal interface so people can interact with their environment. The computer sees their behaviour and then extracts information useful for the user."

Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) has detailed the software used to make their robot dance (see some nice photos over at Pink Tentacle) in a recent press release.  The software, dubbed Choreonoid (Choreography and Humanoid), is similar to conventional computer animation software.  Users create key poses and the software automatically interpolates the motion between them.  What makes the software unique is that it also corrects the poses if they are mechanically unstable, such as modifying the position of the feet and waist, allowing anyone to create motions compatible with the ZMP balancing method.  This is especially important for robots like the HRP-4C, where complicated motions could easily cause it to fall over.

Japanese robotics company HiBot has unveiled a nimble snake bot capable of moving inside air ducts and other narrow places where people can't, or don't want to, go. The ACM-R4H robot, designed for remote inspection and surveillance in confined environments, uses small wheels to move but it can slither and undulate and even raise its head like a cobra. The new robot, which is half a meter long and weighs in at 4.5 kilograms, carries a camera and LEDs on its head for image acquisition and can be fitted with other end-effectors such as mechanical grippers or thermo/infrared vision systems. Despite its seemingly complex motion capabilities, "the control of the robot is quite simple and doesn't require too much training," says robotics engineer and HiBot cofounder Michele Guarnieri.

Marius Muja from University of British Columbia returned to Willow Garage this summer to continue his work object recognition. In addition to working on an object detector that can scale to a large number of objects, he has also been designing a general object recognition infrastructure. One problem that many object detectors have is that they get slower as they learn new objects. Ideally we want a robot that goes into an environment and is capable of collecting data and learning new objects by itself. In doing this, however, we don't want the robot to get progressively slower as it learns new objects. Marius worked on an object detector called Binarized Gradient Grid Pyramid (BiGGPy), which uses the gradient information from an image to match it to a set of learned object templates. The templates are organized into a template pyramid. This tree structure has low resolution templates at the root and higher resolution templates at each lower level. During detection, only a fraction of this tree must be explored. This results in big speedups and allows the detector to scale to a large number of objects.

The main focus for Bastian's work was on the feature-extraction process for 3D data. One of his contributions was a novel interest keypoint extraction method that operates on range images generated from arbitrary 3D point clouds. This method explicitly considers the borders of the objects identified by transitions from foreground to background. Bastian also developed a new feature descriptor type, called NARF (Normal Aligned Radial Features), that takes the same information into account. Based on these feature matches, Bastian then worked on a process to create a set of potential object poses and added spatial verification steps to assure these observations fit the sensor data.

UC3M's ASIROV Robotic Satellite Chaser Prototype ASIROV, the Acoplamiento y Agarre de Satélites mediante Sistemas Robóticos basado en Visión (Docking and Capture of Satellites through computer vision) would use computer vision tech to autonomously chase down satellites in orbit for repair or removal. Image courtesy of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Spanish robotics engineers have devised a new weapon in the battle against zombie-sats and space junk: an automated robotics system that employs computer vision technology and algorithmic wizardry to allow unmanned space vehicles to autonomously chase down, capture, and even repair satellites in orbit. Scientists at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) created the system to allow for the removal of rogue satellites from low earth orbit or the maintenance of satellites that are nearing the ends of their lives, prolonging their service (and extending the value of large investments in satellite tech). Through a complex set of algorithms, space vehicles known as “chasers” could be placed into orbit with the mission of policing LEO, chasing down satellites that are damaged or have gone “zombie” and dealing with them appropriately.

A research project will be conducted this week in Linz, Austria, to discover what the ideal interaction between people and humanoid robots ought to be in the future, Honda R&D and Ars Electronica Futurelab announced today. The research, the first of its kind in Europe, will involve members of the public directly interacting with ASIMO, Honda's humanoid robot.

When we first reported on the Willow Garage PR2 robot, it was just a prototype. Earlier this year, Willow Garage started their beta program, which gave eleven lucky organizations two year access to PR2 robots in exchange for furthering work on open source robotics software. Now we've received word from Willow Garage that the PR2 is officially for sale to anyone who wants it. This is not a toy or hobby robot, of course, so don't expect a small price tag. The full retail price is $400,000 per unit. However, if your organization can demonstrate a proven track record in developing open source software and making contributions to the robotics community, you can get a hefty $120,000 discount on your PR2. For more see our previous stories on Willow Garage and the PR2.

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) were awarded no less than $34.5 million by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to continue their outstanding work in the field of prosthetic limb testing, which has seen them come up with the most advanced model yet. Their Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) system is just about ready to be tested on human subjects, as it has proved successful with monkeys. Basically, the prosthetic arm is controlled by the brain through micro-arrays that are implanted (gently) in the head. They record brain signals and send the commands to the computer software that controls the arm. To be honest, it will be interesting to see just how these hair-chips are attached to the brain, but the APL say clinical tests have shown the devices to be entirely harmless. The monkeys didn’t mind them too much, at least.

Scientists from Bielefeld University have come up with a plastic-head robot called Flobi that can express a number of different emotions, and can have it’s appearance reassembled from male to female (or vice-versa) in a couple of minutes.

SLAM ( Simultaneous localization and mapping ),  PID ( Proportional integral derivative ) controller & ODOMETRY ( hodos, meaning “travel“, “journey” and metron, meaning “measure“)

The latest episode of the Robots Podcast looks at the following scenario: Imagine being able to throw a hand-full of smart matter in a tank full of liquid and then pulling out a ready-to-use wrench once the matter has assembled. This is the vision of this episode's guests Michael Tolley and Jonas Neubert from the Computational Synthesis Laboratory run by Hod Lipson at Cornell University, NY. Tolley and Neubert give an introduction into Programmable Matter and then present their research on stochastic assembly of matter in fluid, including both simulation (see video above) and real-world implementation. Read on or tune in!

You can think of the Distributed Flight Array as a combination between vertical take-off and landing vehicles, and modular reconfigurable robots. It is a flying platform consisting of multiple, autonomous, single-propeller vehicles, and these single propeller vehicles - or modules - are able to generate enough thrust to lift themselves into the air, but are completely unstable in flight, kind of like a helicopter without a tail rotor.

Carnegie Mellon has taught its robotic snake to climb trees, though one hopes it won’t start offering your spouse apples. “Uncle Sam” (presumably named for its red, white, and blue markings) is a snake robot built from modular pieces. The latest in a line of ‘modsnakes’ from Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab, Uncle Sam can move in a variety of different ways including rolling, wiggling, and side-winding. It can also wrap itself around a pole and climb vertically, which comes in handy when scaling a tree. You have to watch this thing in action. There is something incredibly life-like, and eerie, about the way it scales the tree outdoors and then looks around with its camera ‘eye’. Projects like Uncle Sam show how life-mimicking machines could revolutionize robotics in the near future.

It should be able to hold an inert grenade with one hand, and pull the pin with the other hand without the need for human control.  The software system must enable the robot to perform the Challenge Tasks following a high-level script with no operator intervention. For example, the operator would issue a command such as “Throw Ball.” That command would in turn decompose into a sequence of lower-level tasks, such as “find ball,” “grasp ball,” “re-grasp ball, cock arm, and throw.”

Honda and the Ars Electronica Futurelab are collaborating on a human-robot interaction study this week in Linz, Austria (September 2nd ~ 8th).  Although they say their goal is to determine how robots ought to interact with people in the future, I think this may be just an excuse to let the public have some one-on-one fun with ASIMO.  In any case, these sorts of studies should help steer Honda’s engineers in the right direction when designing the next version of the world’s most famous humanoid robot.

Ranger, a four legged bi-pedal robot, set an unofficial record at Cornell last month for walking 23 kilometers (14.3 miles), untethered, in 10 hours and 40 minutes. Walking at an average pace of 2.1 km/h (1.3 miles per hour), Ranger circled the indoor track at Cornell’s Barton Hall 108.5 times, taking 65,185  steps before it had to stop and recharge. Ranger walks much like a human, using gravity and momentum to help swing its legs forward, though its looks like a boom box on stilts. Its swinging gait is like a human on crutches since the robot has no knees, and its two exterior legs are connected at the top and its two interior legs are connected at the bottom.

The Robotics Developer Studio (RDS) Simulator is a key feature of the package that allows you to get started without buying expensive robots. It is a great tool for use in education. The add-ons outlined below help you to create your own simulation environments and get started on learning about robotics.

In its latest episode, the Robots Podcast interviews the lead researcher of the Distributed Flight Array and one of my colleagues at the ETH Zurich's IDSC, Raymond Oung. The Distributed Flight Array (DFA) is an aerial modular robot. Each individual module has a single, large propellor and a set of omniwheels to move around. Since a single propellor does not allow stable flight, modules move around to connect to each other. As shown in this video of the DFA, the resulting random shape then takes flight. After a few minutes of hovering the structure breaks up and modules fall back to the ground, restarting the cycle. As most projects at the IDSC, the DFA is grounded in rigorous mathematics and design principles and combines multiple goals: It serves as a real-world testbed for research in distributed estimation and control, it abstracts many of the real-world issues of the next generation of distributed multi-agent systems, and it provides an illustration for otherwise abstract concepts like distributed sensing and control to a general public. For more information on current work, future plans and real-world applications, read on or tune in!