Posts tagged robotics
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Watch A French Researcher Control A Robot With His Brain
Researchers in Japan are using a brain-machine interface to control the actions of a humanoid robot. The goal is to allow people “to feel embodied in the body of a humanoid robot,” in the words of one researcher.
Roboticists at the CRNS-AIST Joint Robotics Laboratory, a collaboration between the French National Center for Scientific Research and the Japanese Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, are trying to interpret brain waves into actions that can be understood by a robot. In the video, a volunteer wears an electrode cap and watches a screen with flashing dots, which is used to teach his brain to associate flickering objects with actions. By focusing his attention, he can induce actions, which are translated from his brain activity into robotic motion.
A signal processing unit on a computer translates his brain activity and classifies it into a series of tasks. Then the team can instruct the robot on which task to perform. It could help paraplegics who can’t perform certain tasks on their own. Or it could be used for crazyfuture tourism, says Abderrahmane Kheddar, director of the JRL: “A paraplegic patient in Rome would be able to pilot a humanoid robot for sightseeing in Japan.”
"I feel like the Terminator": One-armed man’s life transformed by advanced robot hand
A one-armed man’s life has been transformed by a robot hand so accurate it can grip an egg without cracking it.
Nigel Ackland’s advanced bionic limb has given him back the ability to do everyday tasks such as peeling vegetables, tying laces and typing.
The 53-year-old lost his right arm below the elbow after it was crushed in an industrial accident six years ago.
He struggled with NHS prosthetic parts and was selected to take part in a trial of the pioneering limb – controlled by him twitching muscles in his upper arm.
Nigel said: “I have been blown away by the robotic hand. I could sit and watch it all day. I feel like the Terminator.
"The fingers even move when I yawn and stretch.
“I am slowly becoming more at one with it. Tying a shoe lace and chopping a vegetable are now much easier.”
The former precious metals smelter said: “It has made a massive difference to my life and health. Losing a limb can take you into a dark place.”
Right-handed Nigel, who lives with wife Vanessa, 50, and son Conor, 19, in Royston, Cambridgeshire, was one of seven amputees around the world picked by British prosthetics firm RSLSteeper to try out the bebionic3 hand that costs between £8,000 and £12,000.
A US man who lost his right leg in a motorcycle accident is to attempt history by using a thought-controlled bionic leg to reach the top of one of the world’s tallest skyscrapers simply by thinking: “Climb stairs”.
Advanced exoskeleton promises more independence for people with paraplegia
The dream of regaining the ability to stand up and walk has come closer to reality for people paralyzed below the waist who thought they would never take another step.
A team of engineers at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Intelligent Mechatronics has developed a powered exoskeleton that enables people with severe spinal cord injuries to stand, walk, sit and climb stairs. Its light weight, compact size and modular design promise to provide users with an unprecedented degree of independence.
The university has several patents pending on the design and Parker Hannifin Corporation – a global leader in motion and control technologies – has signed an exclusive licensing agreement to develop a commercial version of the device, which it plans on introducing in 2014.
People plus: is transhumanism the next stage in our evolution?
Inviting artificial intelligence into our bodies has appeal – but it also carries certain risks.
I have often wondered what it would be like to rid myself of a keyboard for data entry, and a computer screen for display. Some of my greatest moments of reflection are when I am in the car driving long distances, cooking in my kitchen, watching the kids play at the park, waiting for a doctor’s appointment or on a plane thousands of metres above sea level.
I have always been great at multitasking but at these times it is often not practical or convenient to be head down typing on a laptop, tablet or smartphone.
It would be much easier if I could just make a mental note to record an idea and have it recorded, there and then. And who wouldn’t want the ability to “jack into” all the world’s knowledge sources in an instant via a network?
Who wouldn’t want instant access to their life-pages filled with all those memorable occasions? Or even the ability to slow down the process of ageing, as long as living longer equated to living with mind and body fully intact, as outlined in the video.
Transhumanists would have us believe that these things are not only possible but inevitable. In short: we Homo sapiens may dictate the next stage of our evolution through our use of technology.
The Consequences of Machine Intelligence
If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?
The question of what happens when machines get to be as intelligent as and even more intelligent than people seems to occupy many science-fiction writers. The Terminator movie trilogy, for example, featured Skynet, a self-aware artificial intelligence that served as the trilogy’s main villain, battling humanity through its Terminator cyborgs. Among technologists, it is mostly “Singularitarians” who think about the day when machine will surpass humans in intelligence. The term “singularity” as a description for a phenomenon of technological acceleration leading to “machine-intelligence explosion” was coined by the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam in 1958, when he wrote of a conversation with John von Neumann concerning the “ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.” More recently, the concept has been popularized by the futurist Ray Kurzweil, who pinpointed 2045 as the year of singularity. Kurzweil has also founded Singularity University and the annual Singularity Summit.
Ping-pong-playing robot learns to play like a person
A ROBOT that learns to play ping-pong from humans and improves as it competes against them could be the best robotic table-tennis challenger the world has seen.
Katharina Muelling and colleagues at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany suspended a robotic arm from the ceiling and equipped it with a camera that watches the playing area. Then Muelling physically guided the arm through different shots to return incoming balls.
The arm was then left to draw on its training to return balls hit by a human opponent. When the ball was in a position it had not seen before, the arm used its library of shots to improvise new ones. After an hour of unassisted practise, the system successfully returned 88 per cent of shots.
Other robots have played table tennis in the past, but none have used human demonstration to learn the game. Ales Ude of the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia says that doing so allows robots to play more like people.
The work, which will be presented at an AAAI symposium in Arlington, Virginia, next month, is part of a broader goal to develop robots that can do a range of tasks after being guided by their owners, Muelling says.
Robots in the Home: Will Older Adults Roll Out the Welcome Mat?
Robots have the potential to help older adults with daily activities that can become more challenging with age. But are people willing to use and accept the new technology? A study by the Georgia Institute of Technology indicates the answer is yes, unless the tasks involve personal care or social activities.
After showing adults (ages 65 to 93 years) a video of a robot’s capabilities, researchers interviewed them about their willingness for assistance with 48 common household tasks. Participants generally preferred robotic help over human help for chores such as cleaning the kitchen, doing laundry and taking out the trash. But when it came to help getting dressed, eating and bathing, the adults tended to say they would prefer human assistance over robot assistance. They also preferred human help for social activities, such as calling family and friends or entertaining guests.
Georgia Tech’s Cory-Ann Smarr will present the results this week at the Human Factors Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting in Boston.
“There are many misconceptions about older adults having negative attitudes toward robots,” said Smarr, a School of Psychology graduate teaching assistant. “The people we interviewed were very enthusiastic and optimistic about robots in their daily lives. They were also very particular in their preferences, something that can assist researchers as they determine what to design and introduce in the home.”
Robots get around by mimicking primates
By mimicking how primates visualise an unfamiliar environment - a process called mental rotation - researchers are building a new kind of guidance system for robots.
Many species of animals perform mental rotation - a poorly understood aspect of spatial reasoning that is nonetheless an integral part of high-level cognition.
"If I tell you to turn left, you will probably ask whose left, mine or yours?" says Ronald Arkin of Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who is leading the effort to incorporate this technique into software for controlling robots. "You have to transform your frame of reference," he says.
The team is now testing their software in a lab setting. The researchers first supply the robot with a destination - a simplified image of how objects in their environment will look from a given perspective. The robot then uses depth information from an on-board Kinect motion sensor to establish how objects look in its surroundings.
Once it has built a picture of where it is, the robot “mentally” rotates the orientation of objects to match its destination, and then plots a path. As it trundles along, it continues to take images of its surroundings and compare them to its destination, just to make sure it is on the right track. In tests, a small four-wheeled robot used this method to find its way 6 metres across a lab floor to the right spot.
It’s a humble beginning, but Arkin says it’s the first time a robot has demonstrated the ability to receive visual instructions and act on them without a map. The work will be presented in December at the ROBIO conference in Guangzhou, China. “When the world isn’t as you expect it to be, this will help you,” he says, adding that the system could also be adapted to use speech recognition software to understand voice commands and use them to build a picture of the destination being described.