In celebration of getting a new job at TNO, with great opportunities to do all sorts of interesting stuff with gesture recognition and robots!
Also, a merry X-mas and a happy new year to you all too! Thanks for the tip to Björnd, my brother, he owns one of these lovely old robots, called Mr. DJ (created by Tomy in the eighties).
There is a fun company called Crabfu, which is basically one guy called I-Wei. He creates great steam powered robots, 3D art and animation and all sorts of robots with cute motion control (swatchbots). The funny thing about his swatchbots is that he uses direct control of the actuators which create the movement, see for example in this video of his R/C Tortoise:
It does remind me a bit of a tortoise
There is a more complete coverage of his work and an interview with him by Discovery channel:
Can someone please give him a job?
So, instead of just being able to steer the robot ‘forward’ you need to work out, on your R/C how to move the limbs? As if you are learning to walk all over again. Would people like to get down to this basic level of motion control? Would it feel funny to get your bot to go where you want it? Maybe. At the very least, his robots do provide a cute impression.
Some of his robots almost feel a bit vulnerable or helpless, because they have such trouble moving forward. It reminded me of Hall Object (or Dibbes), the ‘gezellige robot‘ that was built to live in the hall of the NPS/Vara building and endear the people who worked there.
Wu Yulu’s ‘talking and walking robot’
Wu Yulu is apparently some chinese guy who has built robots on his own. This fella, named La Yang Che (a translation anyone?) can actually walk and sort of talk. The visionary design of Yulu manages to capture a hitherto disregarded aspect of human face-to-face interaction: The flapping of the ears!
While the lip synchronization only distracts from the message, it is clear to see that the flapping of the ears, rhythmically accompanying the spoken words, beats out the tempo and thereby diminishes the cognitive effort needed for speech perception. At the same time, the rolling or darting of the eyes seems to serve merely to enhance the overall aesthetic experience.
This time the robot, Robosaurus, is not from WowWee, nor is it cute, small and safe. There are quite a few robots that you can rent for shows or trade fairs and such. Honda’s Asimo, Titan (Cyberstein), Mico … feel free to add what you know here.
There is a small company called rentarobot. But their robots are quite dull, it appears. You can also rent a robot here, for $750 to $1500 a day (operator included). This company called entertainment robots is also in the rental business. They have quite a good collection and build custom robots for you.
A walk thru of the recently announced Robopanda robot from WowWee at the CES 2008. Quite a talkative little panda robot he is. “Scratch my tummy if you want me to tell you a story, touch my hand if you want to teach me a new trick”. Sounds a bit like “press 1 for this, press 2 for that”.
Endearing or scary?
This video generated a lot of interesting response on YouTube. Most people find it quite disturbing. It reminded me of my little kid who can also be scared by toy robots. Could it be the case that, as we grow older, we are not so easily scared because we can analyse the toy robots. And if we then encounter one that we cannot analyse we freak out? Hmmm, it seems to be a much more direct emotional response. What is it about these robots that approach human-like features.
Mori’s Uncanny Valley.
It seems to be a clear cut example of what Mori described: The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness (source wikipedia).
Bear in mind that the uncanny valley has not been ‘proven’ scientifically, but since it is philosophically impossible to prove a scientific hypothesis, it is more important that it has not been disproven, yet. Bartneck wrote two papers about it, see the refs in wikipedia.
Impression of the Tokyo Toy Show
Couple of highlights:
Stuff from Takara Tomy: Eve and Wall-E robots, i-Sobot customizations
Light Sabre fencing from Bandai.
Sega’s love robot E.M.A. at the Tokyo Toy Show 2008?
Looks exactly like WowWee’s Femisapien to me… Give us a kiss then, little one 🙂
Here is how I wake up every morning…
in my dreams, right before I actually wake up
Shaving as an affectionate gesture
and a symbol of dedication
Read more a RobotSkin (just the graphics are already worth a visit)
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 ROBO ONE competition.
The Micromouse competition: speed, accuracy, search algorithms, navigation. They get a first run to explore the maze and then ‘speed runs’ to set their best time for the fastest route they found.
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.
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