Reach: Robot video

While I am away for another week and posting on this blog is sparse, enjoy the below video of a cute little robot reaching for its dream. The video called "REACH" is Luke Randall's entry in the Cannes Short Film Corner competition.

The autonomous city explorer robot

It is not every day that you see robots traveling long distances around a city without GPS and with the help of perfect strangers. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the tweenbots project which used the kindness of strangers to guide the robot to its destination. But that project used a very simple kind of robot not capable of much more than moving on a straight line.

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich have been developing a city exploring robot that is capable of interacting with strangers using speech, hand gestures and a touch screen to get information from them. The Autonomous City Explorer (ACE) project has successfully demonstrated the robot navigating 1.5Km around Munich.

ACE is a very complex robot using a number of advanced sensors and algorithms to sense the surrounding environment, move without colliding with obstacles and, of course, interacting with other pedestrians who stop to help the robot find its way. The robot which comes equipped with both stereo vision and laser sensors stands 178cm tall and weighs 160Kgrs. A total of 3 onboard computers provide the necessary processing power for navigation and interaction. Lastly, the robot can move at a maximum speed of 1.4m/sec and slopes of up to 6 degrees but obviously at a much slower speed.

ACE navigates by constructing topological maps of its environment as it moves along. It uses specially designed modules to detect the traversability of regions used for path planning and following. It is capable of detecting people using skin color detection and tracking them as they move. The interaction interface using speech and gestures can be a bit crude as it requires people to stand in a way that is easy to interpret but it is a step ahead anything else out there.

The video below describes the system details and shows the robot in action interacting with other pedestrians and safely navigating in an urban environment.

Hawk: The Canadian humanoid robot

A small Canadian robotics company that has been around for nearly a decade but we hardly ever hear any news about recently started selling their own version of a humanoid robot with dual arms and a wheeled base. Hawk is Dr. Robot’s research, education, and entertainment robot.

The robot stands 1.4 meters tall and comes loaded with a number of sensors including vision, sonar, and laser (an optional upgrade to the base system.) Hawk resembles a human only in its upper body which consists of a torso complete with two arms (6 degrees of freedom each) and a movable head with stereo vision. A small touch screen on the robot’s chest allows for a more reliable method for commanding the robot.

The robot’s base is an i90 wheeled base made by the same company. Dr. Robot claims that Hawk can operate from as little as 2 hours to as long as 8 hours before recharging. The longer time can be achieved after an upgrade to the robot’s battery pack. Finally, Hawk can lift weights of 0.8-1.0 Kgrs which should be enough to carry small items around the house.

It is not clear to me how autonomous the robot can be when it comes to performing complex tasks but it comes with cross-platform software allowing users to tele-operate Hawk. The company claims that the robot is capable of simultaneous localization and mapping which should allow it a good degree of mobility around a house. For example, its navigation capabilities including visual locating a charging station and autonomously docking for recharging its batteries.

The video below shows the robot Hawk performing part of a serving task opening a bottle of water and pouring it into two different glasses.

Wolfram Alpha demo video

Stephen Wolfram's new search engine Wolfram Alpha is scheduled to go live this month. It is not online yet, by Stephen has been going around showing off some of its capabilities to academics. He recently did a long presentation at Harvard University which if anything increased the hype surrounding Wolfram's computational knowledge engine. The 10-minute video below shows a small part of the presentation including screen shots of the engine's responses to a few of Stephen's queries. It definitely looks like a very interesting service and I am looking forward to using it. I just have to figure out what would be the right questions to ask in order to really take full advantage of the machinery behind the interface. Hmmmm...