Various enterprises and personal interests, such as Man-Machine Interaction (MMI), gesture studies, signs, language, social robotics, healthcare, innovation, music, publications, etc.
A major issue in the teleoperation of robots (e.g. UGVs) is the idea that teleoperation can be made easier by creating telepresence. Telepresence is not a thing that is limited to teleoperation, and the term appears to originate from work on teleconferencing. Below is an illustrative video about telepresence. Further down are a few more vids that provide an impression of the sort of camera images an operator has at his or her disposal for teleoperation of a robot.
POC: Kyle D. Fawcett, kfawcett@mitre.org
Telepresence technologies use interfaces and sensory input to mimic interaction with a remote environment to trick your brain into thinking you’re actually in the remote environment. Visual telepresence tricks your eyes into thinking they’ve been transported into a remote environment. This unlocks the brains natural spatial mapping abilities and thus enhances operation of closed cockpit armored vehicles and teleoperation of unmanned vehicles. The MITRE Immersive Vision system is a highly responsive head aimed vision system used for visual telepresence. Videos of MIVS experiments show the effectiveness of the system for robot teleoperation and virtually see-through cockpits in armored vehicles.
I think Salvador DaBot is a very nice example of a very entertaining robot that has some very neat tricks up his sleeve. The gesture routines are nicely done as well. And there is some form of face recognition or modelling going on. Well done!
«Your printer is only botching its job and does not know anything about pop-art! It even can’t dance!»
Salvador DaBot, 2008
The Portraitist Robot recognizes human faces in its surroundings and extracts relevant characteristics from them. By using its uncanny artistic talent, it then draws portraits of the participants from the captured images by converting them into vector art and by using inverse kinematics to control the robot’s arm.
More information on http://www.calinon.ch/portraitist.php
Among the new features, the Portraitist Robot v2.0 has been patched with moustache and beret add-ons.
Contours of the faces are first extracted from the images captured through the robot’s internal cameras. The contours are then converted to paths by organizing them with respect to their lengths.
Then, the image is segmented into several shades of gray. The contours and extracted areas are simplified to keep only the important features of the face and make it look similar to a cartoon representation. The different shades of gray will be reproduced by the robot by adding several layers of drawing patterns that are painted by the robot. These patterns are designed to make the painting look more artistic. The different areas are filled similarly as a human would do by recursively starting from one point, filling the current area, and jumping to another area when it is finished.
Finally, a robust inverse kinematics controller is used to convert the 2D drawing into a set of joint angles that are run on the robot.
To look more human-like, motions of the left arm and head have been recorded through the use of motion sensors attached to the body of a person demonstrating the gesture to the robot. This process is indeed highly relevant as even when standing in a fixed posture, humans are producing small oscillations which are important to reproduce gestures that look natural and which can be reproduced on the robot to make it look more lively.
Apart from promoting Robotics as being a fun and interesting research area, this work also aims at showcasing the capabilities of the HOAP-3 robot as well as the integration of different motor and sensory components such as vision processing, clustering, human-robot interaction, speech synthesis, inverse kinematics and redundant control of humanoid robots.
See a Robosapien robot respond to voice commands using Robosapien Dance Machine (Robodance); a free software program for Windows PC’s. (Requires an inexpensive infrared transmitter too and 512MB or more of RAM – see web site for details).
