A mix of posts on gesture, HCI, perception or robots and some personal information.
Karen Pine gave a Gesture lecture at the MPI Nijmegen, entitled ‘More than I can say…’ Why gestures are key to children’s development.
Abstract: My interest in gesture came from testing children in a cognitive domain and realizing that they knew far more than they could say. I found I could get a better idea about [...]
Here are a few examples of robot competitions that are quite entertaining:
The ROBO ONE competition is ‘biped robot entertainment’ (official site). It highlights agility, balance and motion. They are remote controlled but to some extent, in the microcontrol of the movement, autonomous.
12th KondoCup Robot Soccer competition (Source: Robots Dreams). These robots also feature in the [...]
Here are two robot guys, Patrick Norton and David Calkins, discussing the reasons behind the competitions with biped humanoid robots (Source: Robots Dreams). It is a bit long but it is a good overview of the important issues. They also discuss proprioception which ties into the discussions about robots and embodied cognition.
Another interesting author on social robotics is Marcel Heerinkk, who works at the HvA, Instituut voor Information Engineering. He has been doing PhD work on robotics and elderly people. Practically all his publications are together with three UvA people: Ben Kröse (IS lab), Bob Wielinga, and Vanessa Evers (both HCS lab). Kröse is also lector [...]
Another strong author on robotics in the Netherlands is Christoph Bartneck. He works at the TU/e, faculty of Industrial Design, sub-department Designed Intelligence (which is only slightly less scary than intelligent design). His list of publications on robotics is very impressive. Recently, there are a couple together with Mathias Rauterberg, the prof who heads the [...]
There are plenty of robot championships, and one of the more famous ones is ROBO-ONE. In this fight you can see some of the champions in a tag-team wrestling match. Good fun! Wish I could understand Japanese though…
Amazing…
I really like what they did with this dino. It does not actually do much, thereby leaving all the more room to project all sorts of ideas into it. It must be scared, sleepy, afraid, etc.
Here is Albert van Breemen’s final movie of the i-Qbot:
Some people on forums are complaining about the i-Qbot: it appears to be quite hard to program and it doesn’t do much on its own. Van Breemen emphasizes the great learning experience. Looking at the ‘end result video’, I can imagine both views.
There is a very good dutch blogger, called Albert van Breemen, on http://www.personalrobotics.nl/. I got to him when I was checking out the i-QBOT, which he reviewed extensively.
From his About: Albert van Breemen is a Senior Projectleader at Philips Research Laboratories Eindhoven, The Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of [...]
g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.
Oblong Industries created the UI from Minority Report that the people involved had been working on for the movie. It has the same majestic feeling about it as in the movie, although these are not demi-gods with Tom Cruise standards of control. Interesting, yet the question remains how [...]
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